Re: startup times

[Martin Grabmueller]

> From: "Neil W. Van Dyke" <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 09:25:35 -0400 (EDT)
> 
> I just noticed that Guile startup time gets noticeably slow once
> you start loading packages.
> 
> Here's the best times for three separate "time guile -c" commands,
> on my P5-166 Linux laptop:
> 
>   (display "X")                            0.960u 0.010s 0:01.02
>   (use-modules (oop goops)) (display "X")  2.230u 0.050s 0:02.35
>   (use-modules (net http))  (display "X")  3.280u 0.060s 0:03.44
> 
> Plain Guile with HTTP library (which also loads GOOPS) takes over
> 3 seconds to load before loading application code.

Just out of curiosity: Do you have an especially slow hard disk or
something?  The following are the times on my desktop P5-200 (with
current CVS guile):

  (display "X")                            0.280u 0.030s 0:00.320
  (use-modules (oop goops)) (display "X")  0.730u 0.030s 0:00.800
  (use-modules (net http))  (display "X")  1.170u 0.060s 0:01.274

Your times are about 3 (3.42 to 2.80) times slower, wheras my
processor is only about 1.20481927710843 times faster...  Strange.

> Will any startup speed improvements make it into 1.6?

I have made some experiments with preprocessing Guile modules and
generating fastloading code, but it only gave a few percents
improvement.  In another experiment I tried what happens if you
include the code of boot-9.scm as a character array into the Guile
library and read from that string, but it didn't help either.

Some time ago, I tried to use gprof with Guile, but it always dumped
core and I could not figure out what the problem was, so I stopped
that.  Personally, I don't know what could be done for improving
startup times.

Regards,
  'martin