Using shell commands versus C equivalents

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

On Wed, 13 Jun 2007, youshi10 at u.washington.edu wrote:

> 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.


Since you are interested in speeding up the pkg_* stuff, I thought I would 
bring these to your attention (speed ups to the pkg_create and port 
registration processes, not quite what you are doing, but related).

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=112765
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=112630

Let me also wish you good luck in your speed improvements.  I was rather 
encouraged by these two, but all my future searches proved somewhat 
negative.  In particular I looked rather hard at trying to speed up "make" 
(required for pkg_version when it calls "make -V PKGNAME" multiple times). 
I can tell you that in that instance, replacing linear lists by berkeley 
DB made no difference at all - it was very disappointing.  In short, you 
really want to do a lot of profiling and see where the speed bottlenecks 
really are before writing lots of code.

Stephen