Danek Duvall wrote:
> Roland Mainz wrote:
> 
>> The question is "why are longer build times be painfull" ?
> 
> Because the official builds machine already take 10+ hours to build all of
> SFW.  If a nightly is broken for any reason, the turnaround time to get a
> good build out is a long time.
> 
> Again, it may still be worth the pain, but the cost of doing this is not
> free, so we should take some care in the analysis of what needs to be
> optimized, and to what degree.

I have a (somewhat theoretical) question about the potential 
performance benefit we could get by tweaking the compiler optimization 
flags in this particular case:

The discussion here seems to be centered around software which is used 
by WebStack applications -- and specifically some graphics libraries.

Considering what a typical web application generally does:

- parse and byte-compile PHP, generate dynamic HTML
- maybe talk to a relational database and get some data from there as well
- get stuff from the network (referenced sites)
- wait for slowly responding referenced web sites

Out of the total cost of rendering this hypothetical page, how much 
optimization can we hope to obtain by tweaking the compiler flags for 
libtiff, libjpeg and libgd2 ?

I am certainly not opposed to the idea of tweaking compiler flags -- 
quite the opposite, i'm all for it. I'm just being a downer, and 
suggesting that, out of the total cost of rendering dynamic HTML 
pages, the speed increases we might obtain by tweaking the graphics 
libraries could very well end up in disappointment.

Having said that, libjpeg and libtiff on SPARC could benefit from 
being built for sparcv8plusa and sparcv9a. libgd2 is already built 
that way.

0.02.

--Stefan

-- 
Stefan Teleman
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
stefan.teleman at Sun.COM


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