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

[Bryan Christ]

It ended up being a bit more involved to write this so I don't think it's appropriate for ncurses

in it's current form.  With a 12 slot LRU gclock, pair_content (and subroutines) went from

being a 70% offender in F29 (in my emulator) to about 1.6%.  I still haven't tried the new

patch.  I'll probably wait for one of your roll-up builds.

On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 7:42 PM Thomas Dickey <address@hidden> wrote:

On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 07:30:34PM -0600, Bryan Christ wrote:
> Thomas,
>
> I saw the patch but haven't yet tested with it.   However, I spent some time
> contemplating real, practical implementations of ncurses and what those apps
> typically look like.  Applying the 80/20 rule, I would say that most apps
> use only a handful of color pairs... somewhere in the range of 4 - 8 but on

Actually there's two main uses: the small number that you're referring to
and the other realm where people use things like solarized (using lots more
than 4-8 colors).  Applications that map color requests are relatively few -
screen/tmux simply rely upon the actual terminal and don't map.

> my
> emulator I enumerate all 64 pairs because I simply don't know what the app
> will require.  It's probably a worse situation for other terminals
> that support 256 pairs.  I think tiny LRU cache would make all the
> difference... something like clock or gclock with about 6 slots.  The
> code would be quite small but the performance gains would be substantial.
> The question is would this be something that ncurses would benefit from as
> a whole, or is this just something I should pursue myself.  Let me know if
> you'd be interested in taking a patch for that.  If not, I'm still going
> to add it to my library.  Just let me know either way.

I could discuss it - but have a hunch that you won't find much benefit
in using the internal state of ncurses, so it would end up being an
add-on that could just as easily be a demo.  But take a look and see :-)

> On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 5:23 PM Thomas Dickey <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 09:48:01AM -0600, Bryan Christ wrote:
> > > 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().
> >
> > hmm - the improvement I saw (reducing calls to _nc_reserved_pairs by
> > inlining the checks) works well enough (according to gprof...),
> > but there is at least another factor: whether the sp-funcs feature is used.
> >
> > See
> >
> >
> > https://github.com/ThomasDickey/my-autoconf-snapshots/blob/master/AcSplit/CF_ABI_DEFAULTS
> >
> > it's a standard part of ABI 6, and accounts for the function names ending
> > with "_sp".  That adds a little to the time since it adds a layer of
> > function calls.
> >
> > The Fedora trace shows it's being used (the rpm spec says it builds
> > ABI 5 and ABI 6, without overriding that feature); Bionic doesn't:
> >         a) it's still using ABI 5, and
> >         b) Ubuntu copies Debian packages.  Debian testing has ABI 5 and 6,
> >            so sometime Ubuntu will get it (there's always a delay).
> >
> > The _nc_reserve_pairs code is used as part of new functionality to
> > support color pairs past 32767. sp-funcs is used to help developers
> > write reentrant code.  Speeding either of those up by eliminating
> > a layer of calls would require lots of code duplication.  (If someone
> > has _other_ approaches to improving performance, that's interesting).
> >
> > By the way, Debian's ABI 6 development overrides part of the ABI defaults
> > listed above (the chtype/mmask_t details), so it wastes space.  I mentioned
> > that before.
> >
> > --
> > Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
> > https://invisible-island.net
> > ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net
> >
>
>
> --
> Bryan
> <><

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

--

Bryan
<><