Using shell commands versus C equivalents

[Andrew Turner]

On Sat, 16 Jun 2007 21:53:06 -0700
Tim Kientzle <kientzle at freebsd.org> wrote:

> >    Also, were the bottlenecks seen in pkg_delete and pkg_add, or
> > does it appear to be distributed across the board?
> 
> The biggest time sink in pkg_add is writing each file to a temp
> dir then copying it to its final location.  There are a couple
> of strategies for avoiding this (by writing the files directly
> to their final location), but it basically requires rewriting
> pkg_add from scratch.  I prototyped this a long time ago and
> found about a 3x speedup.  (Parts of that prototype eventually
> became libarchive.)
I've also seen a 3x speedup by using my reimplementation of pkg_add
using my package management library, libpkg (http://libpkg.berlios.de).
It is not production ready yet as if it fails partway through an
installation it won't clean up and installed files.

 
> I haven't looked closely at pkg_delete, but I doubt there's
> much that can be done to speed it up; once you've examined the
> dependency information to determine what can be deleted,
> actually removing the files is a pretty straightforward
> operation.
I ran a quick test on installing and removing a single package with
both the cvs and my own version of pkg_delete. I got a small but
significant speed improvement with my implementation. The difference
was too small to be noticeable by a human though (from 0.11s to 0.07s).

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Turner
http://fubar.geek.nz/blog/