Using shell commands versus C equivalents

[youshi10 at u.washington.edu]

On Wed, 13 Jun 2007, Tim Kientzle wrote:

>>>> Next step, eliminating the linked list structure in favor or red-black
>>>> trees, maybe.
>>> 
>>> Due to the way pkg_install works, this most likely is just adding
>>> complexity for no gain, it might actually slow it down.
>> 
>> Hmmm... the only thing is that it does the linked list traversal a number of 
>> times per dependency. I'll take a look in gdb at the size of each dependency 
>> and then confer with Kirill (my mentor) about that a bit more.
>
> If you tend to look for the same few items over and over,
> just move items to the front of the list as soon as you
> find them.  Alternatively, if you know you won't look for
> this item ever again, move it to the end of the list or
> remove it from the list entirely.
>
> Simple tricks like this can greatly speed things up with
> almost no effort.  Better yet, do easy things like this first;
> if they help, then look at more complex approaches.
>
> As Joerg said, though, you're not likely to gain much from
> this.  pkg_install is almost entirely disk bound.
>
> I spent a lot of time recently in libarchive/bsdtar optimizing
> the disk handling; I can share lots of ideas for improving
> performance of disk-bound operations like this.
>
> Tim Kientzle

Thank you Tim. I'll definitely keep that in mind :).
-Garrett

PS I'm looking at pkg_install and pkg_version mostly, but I'll be looking into the other package utilities closely in the next couple weeks, evaluating what approaches I should take in solving some bottlenecks with installing packages and ports. My goals are up on <http://wiki.freebsd.org/GarrettCooper>, and will be modified soon.