Re: [gentoo-dev] Do we want optimal performance?

[Corvus Corax <corvus-ml@cybertrench.com>]

Am Wed, 8 Sep 2004 13:29:01 +0200
schrieb Paul de Vrieze <pauldv@gentoo.org>:

> ...
> 
> To do this for programs, one would need to have a realistic suite of 
> "tests" that simulate the real world use of the application. Of course 
> that also allows -fprofile_arcs to be used.
> 
> Paul
> 

depending on the type of program - for easy command line converter tools, an
easy "time" command would be sufficient (used that to determine potential (in
code) optimizations for my motiontrack stuff)

however for libraries like QT or gtk which affect on screen performace of gui
programs - both run-time and load - this will get much harder.

Maybe one could program a test-suite for each library that fires each function
once and times them, along with a flag saved before startup to determine load
time - but it would have to be done for every huge library.

And finally the timing of interactive programs itself - well, usually most time
goes while waiting for user input anyway, but there are timing critical tasks,
too, imagine pattern searches or other big db operatins - or file load/save in
openoffice, picture effects in gimp and such.
those could maybe timed by doing them on a real huge data blog, where the single
operation takes that long, that the user can measure it manually with a
stopwatch.
If the operation takes 40 seconds, and you can gain 3 seconds by
optimisations, it is a blunt measurable improvement. However I dont like that
idea, maybe one can time the operation by watching tmp files in background or
something like this.

Or the maintainer could go into the code and insert some debug lines to print
timing information to stderr or such. But this would be way to much work for
most maintainers and most software isnt it ?

(Well I still could do it on my own software and tell the maintainer the
result;)


just some thoughts...

regards

Corvus



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