Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Slow inventories on large source trees

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Mike Hearn <address@hidden>

    > On the WineHQ source tree, with an in-tree build, doing tla
    > inventory --ids >/dev/null takes approximately 20 seconds on my
    > athlon 1200 with 256mb of ram.

    > This makes certain operations extremely slow, and this is
    > problematic for us (the Wine developers thinking of adopting
    > arch).

    > The total source tree when a complete build has been done is
    > approximately 560mb of data.

    > I haven't tested with an out-of-tree build - while I suspect
    > performance would be better, I'm really not sure we want to ask
    > everyone to do out-of-tree builds to work around this slowness
    > in arch.

    > Are there any ideas for how to optimize this? The CVS gateway
    > tree is using names tagging, though a real switch to arch would
    > be using explicit tags in future.


Names tagging, eh?

Could you please (in no particular order and paying attention to and
taking steps to mitigate effects of OS-level FS caching):

1) measure the speed of GNU `find' on this tree with 

        find . '!' -uid 0

   (I'm assuming that root does not own any files in this tree.  The
    find expression is to force `find' to stat files.)

2) report user/system/real times for `inventory'

3) build tla from scratch with profiling (you can set CFLAGS= on the 
   `make' command line) and summarize where most time is being spent

4) (especially if it should turn out that most time is being spent in
   re* or rx* functions) let us know (a) have you customized
   =tagging-method and (b) do you use many .arch-inventory files?

-t