[AG-TECH] Venue client too slow

[Andrew Daviel]

On Fri, 3 Dec 2004, Ivan R. Judson wrote:

> Additionally, it looks like you identified a startup problem with the image
> loading information, we can look into that, but I'm wondering if you
> compared the startup with a non-ag wxpython application to see what the
> "baseline" is for a wxpython app (there's a great demo that might be good
> for this)?

Which demo were you thinking of ? I found a few odd ones; see below.


I removed the ISO8859-2 and KOI-8 font packages, which cuts down on a few
file operations.

This now on my desktop: RedHat 9, Athlon XP 2400, 2GHz, 512Mb. Another
1-CPU Linux box, that takes forever (> 1 minute) to change rooms in the
Venue client with Rat running. I'd really like an answer to this, as I
can't reasonably buy a single-CPU box to do AG on this basis even if it
is $1000 cheaper. (Windows might be better for a dedicated box, but I'm
not really comfortable with it, and it's not an option for AG on our
desktops) ... more on Rat in next message ...

I tried counting file opens, attempted file opens, reads, writes,
futexes  (userland mutex as I recall) and CPU times from the
shell "time" command for a variety of applications and python scripts.
These are what I found:

                        file operations                                 CPU time
                   open open/notfound read    write     futex     real user sys
VenueServer.py
  to start          548  2484
VenueClient.py
  to start          978  3580                            4000      4   1.3  0.16
  to enter room     1000 3610                            4815      13  1.6 0.18
                                                 (+4000 per room)
  to exit           1032 3673         7743     3602
mozilla-bin         298  392          2740      506       485      7  1.3  0.18
xine                479  662                              280      4  0.34 0.08
pine                 43   79                                0
display              64  195                                7      3  0.4 0.01
xv                    71  387                               7
mplayer              60   156                               1
wxGrid_MegaExample.py 263 813                               2      3.7 0.65 0.09
wxWizard.py          429  669                               2
PyFillingApp.py      789  1195                              2
wxTextEntryDialog.py 234  648         841       267         2
00-HELLO-WORLD.py     82  284         65        341
python<<EOF           48  191                               1
perl<<EOF              9   38                               0


There are a total of about 49,000 system calls for VenueClient (entries
in strace), cf. 12,000 for Mozilla or 109,000 for Pine (which was seeking
all through mail folders with maybe 10,000 messages, and messing around
with signals, and takes too long to do it IMO)



-- 
Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada
Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376  (Pacific Time)
security at triumf.ca