Ticket http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/8254
"sage takes way too long to startup"
seems to irritate a lot of people. It does not me too much, but I feel one way
to at least start to tackle this probably is to get some quantifiable data and
see where the time is being spent. My hunch is that this is due to disk I/O.
If we all append our results running
time echo "2+2;" | /absolute/path/to/sage
where /absolute/path/to/sage should be a *local* file system. If it is shared
via NFS, then it just adds another unknown.
Then we might get somewhere and see if there is a common problem, though I think
'dtrace' on Solaris or OS X is likely to be the most useful tool for debugging
this.
Considering the age of my SPARC (it is circa 2000), I'm getting a startup time
less than some are reporting with what I suspect is much more modern hardware.
One thing my SPARC does however have is disks and a disk interface which is
probably superior to 90% of modern PCs.
I'd suggest running it 5x, reporting the median value for "median" values of
"real" time, and as well as maximum and minimum.
So here is one set of data/
1) Sun Blade 2000, circa 2000
2 x 900 MHz UltraSPARC III+ CPUs
Load average 1 (Sorry, I'm doing something and can't stop that)
1x 147 GB Seagate SEAGATE-ST3146807FC. 15,000 rpm SCSI with a 2 Gbit/s fibre
channel interface.
Sage version 4.3.3 with patches for Solaris as documented at
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/8409
Median of the 5 runs is:
sage: sage:
Exiting SAGE (CPU time 0m0.17s, Wall time 0m0.19s).
real 0m8.263s
user 0m6.502s
sys 0m1.392s
Maximum time of the 5 runs is
real 0m8.356s
Minimum tie of the 5 runs is
real 0m8.066s
I can't be bothered to determine whether that is statistically significant or
not, but it seems to me that data is pretty reproducible.
What is clear here is that this seems to be CPU bound on my old machine, which
is hardly surprising given the old CPUs, but 15,000 rpm disks. That might give
us a clue.
Anyone else care to put their data here too?
Dave
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