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.
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