Re: Debug as default...

[Riccardo]

Hey,

On Tuesday, September 12, 2006, at 02:41 AM, Gregory John Casamento 
wrote:

> Could you be more specific about what architectures, how much memory, 
> what operating system you are seeing the sluggishness on?   If there 
> are performance bottlenecks in GNUstep, this information would be 
> extremely helpful in rooting out any problems which might exist.

the claim was rather generic and referred mostly to the feel of speed: 
that is, application opening time, response time in opening new 
documents... memory usage... Also comparing to speed of other 
applications with other libraries on the same machines. Since we claim 
to be a lean library and critique gtk2 bloat, people seeing our spartan 
look (which, you all know, I do like, but that is not the point) assume 
and pretend it to be faster.

I mainly tested on two similar PIII laptops, one with Linux (art) and 
one NetBSD (xlib) and then on my work laptop which is a centrino with 
768MB of ram and uses xlib.

Of course everything is faster on the centrino, but the speed rations to 
other applications and among gnustep applications is about the same.

After our IRC discussion, I inspected things a bit further and would 
show the main spots to investigate (not said that we can do something 
about them)

- start time
several application seem to cause quite some disc activity on load. I 
suspected swapping, but that is not really the case probably. On the 
centrino which has plenty of ram, Opening and closing smaller 
applications like ink, textedit but also some bigger apps like gorm 
yields a sensible speed increase, thus I suspect caching in ram by 
linux. DOes gnustep app "load" too much at startup? or ?

- daemons
I use gworkspace and it gets started anyway automatically by gopen. It 
is currently by far the biggest in terms of RAM and slowest application 
to start. Also it starts some daemons, which add to gdomap, gdnc, gpbs.
So I usually have 5 daemons running... each is about 4MBytes [*] in 
footprint, not too slim, aren't they ? They are non-gui apps.. is it the 
obj-c runtime that is so fat or is there room for improvment ?
Maybe all of them could be improved by a common thing, maybe some could 
be simplified...

- memory usage
some of our application consume quite a bit of ram. Gorm, which is 
clearly a complicated application with many models and internal data 
structures, occupies about 16M with a loaded document. [*]
ProjectCenter which is clearly a simple app and should be pretty 
straight forward.. consumes just a little less! Talksoup about 
10Mbytes...

All these figures come from idle stuff... if you open GNUMail with 
really a lot of spam.. stuff goes up, up up :) with GWorkspace 
inspecting some image as content... I got a virtual memory exhausted 
error today. And that with 768MB of ram and I think 1GB of swap...

To everything I amy add that the performance of our gui+back is not that 
excellent and resembles swing sometimes... adding an impression of 
slugginess (well they do several things similarly AFAIK) especially on 
some X11 implementations.

Thus I would say that there is no immediate real "problem" and we could 
file here and there to improve things. No urgency and I didn't want to 
stir up a can of worms... just say a friendly reminder.


Riccardo

[*] memory reaouts are approximative figures read out with top on my 
netbsd box. I will try to do more serious profiling if I can get exmap 
to work, the same tool used by KDE people to benchmark their stuff.