Re: Autotest function usage

[Eric Blake]

Ralf Wildenhues <Ralf.Wildenhues <at> gmx.de> writes:

> I would be interested to know what performance impact these changes 
> have on w32 (after all, the idea to free the memory after the function
> tests are used has not been implemented yet).  There is a 14% win on
> GNU/Linux:

I'm glad to hear that GNU/Linux was helped.  Best of three timings on cygwin:

pre (using http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=autoconf.git;a=commit;h=e492685, 
with the typo fix but not the shell function fix):
$ time ( ./testsuite 1 >/dev/null)
real    0m9.656s
user    0m11.525s
sys     0m3.750s
$ time ( ./testsuite -10 >/dev/null)
real    0m47.484s
user    0m56.805s
sys     0m20.991s

post (using http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=autoconf.git;a=commit;h=99be32):
$ time ( ./testsuite 1 >/dev/null)
real    0m9.703s
user    0m11.380s
sys     0m4.212s
$ time ( ./testsuite -10 >/dev/null)
real    0m47.250s
user    0m56.916s
sys     0m21.516s

Ambiguous results, but the best times are all within .1 second, and the times 
not listed were all with .4 seconds, which is in the noise compared to the 
overall timings.  Your patch was a wash for w32: it neither hurt nor helped.

Effectively, your patch eliminated the reason to worry about freeing the memory 
across forks, since the test groups are no longer occupying memory as 
functions.  Also, your approach supercedes my idea about performing a single 
sed script up front - since we are no longer using shell functions, the 
$at_test_source can no longer contain more than one test at a time.

-- 
Eric Blake