Re: API pair_content() call is about 7x slower on Fedora 29 vs Bionic

[Bryan Christ]

I realize the linear searches are not good but there's no easy way

around it.  Libvterm inits 64 color pairs (8 x 8) in keeping with the

64 colors allowed by the RXVT definition.  I do this because I have no

way of knowing how many / which colors some program running under the

emulator will need.  In the case of the demo program that gets built

with libvterm, I, as the implementer/integrator of the library, know how

to best look-up those color pairs and can therefore provide a better

callback.  I don't know that other users of the library will do the

same so it would be ideal if the performance could be at least as good

as on Bionic with the default linear lookup using pair_content().  

On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 5:45 AM Thomas Dickey <address@hidden> wrote:

On Fri, Dec 28, 2018 at 11:05:20AM -0600, Bryan Christ wrote:
> Thomas,
>
> Here's another callgrind log.  This one is from Bionic with the default
> callback
> installed (the wrapper for pair_content).  You can see that pair_content()
> does show
> up, but it's several times less impactful than the same scenario on F29.

thanks.  I see that you also checked in the code which calls pair_content,
and will make a benchmark to help with the discussion.  I can see some
area for improvement in ncurses (benchmark will show how much), but the
linear lookup of color pairs which you're doing is the main problem:

        a) if a pair is not initialized, you don't get much benefit from
           asking about it, since it has predefined (useless..) content.
        b) linear searches are _slow_, even for 512 elements.

Since your emulator captures all of the color information, it probably
would be better to limit the loop to the number of pairs actually
used, as well as to use tsearch to lookup the color information (using
your own cache).

I'll followup once I've done the benchmark/improvements.

--
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
https://invisible-island.net
ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net

--

Bryan
<><