Hello, In upgrading Sage (http://sagemath.org) from Maxima-5.16 to Maxima-5.19 some of our users have encountered a major show-stopper issue. These are users that install Sage on certain NFS mounted directories where certain filesystem operations are necessarily slow. Basically, starting up Maxima 5.19 takes minutes (!), whereas Maxima-5.16 was nearly instant (all else being equal).
One user ran strace and said that the following two things jumped out at him: 1. "maxima opens the root directory / and stats each file found there. Then it does the same thing for the /u (home) directory. The sys admin believes the bottleneck is the slow response of doing a stat on each NFS home directory, especially slowed down by the home directories that are remotely NFS mounted from across the country." >From a computer security viewpoint, the user also expressed very strong concerns about why maxima is running stat on / and /u. 2. The user reports that "maxima reads the file local/lib/ecl-9.10.2/sysfun.lsp one character at a time doing 72K read() calls of one character each. The sys admin doubts that is anywhere near the problem of the NFS stat calls, but it does seem inefficient." So, I'm curious if the above rings any bells for anybody familiar with recent Maxima development. Even a hint as to where I can look to see what's going on would be greatly appreciated. -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
