Re: [Libreoffice] Mac Build with lang=ALL

On Wed, 2011-01-12 at 10:47 -0600, Norbert Thiebaud wrote:
> indeed it is a dog. it took 15h20.
> conservatively at least 13 hours of it were in helcontent2, mostly I/O
> bound creating temp files and copying things around over and over.

        Wow; that is bad.

> based on profiling while this was running... I did another attempt at
> building just helpcontent2 but with the follwing tweak:

        :-)

> export TMPDIR to a directory in a ramdisk and link unxmacxi.pro of
> helpcontent2 to another directory in the same ramdisk (3.5GB needed)

        It is interesting that that gives a big speedup.

> the build of helcontent2 in these condition dropped to 26 minutes elapsed.

        A huge win. Personally, I find it hard to believe that the problem is
not I/O related - ie. to do something -that- slow, a file-system has to
fsync (ie. physically move the disk heads) I imagine, I don't think much
else can explain it. Out of interest how fast is:

mkdir /tmp/small ; time for (( a=1; a<=10000; a++ )) do touch /tmp/small/$a; rm /tmp/small/$a; done

        for you ? I get 22 to 26 seconds (on my two test machines), one has
an SSD, the other a hard-disk, but you can see that neither write anything
to the disk in that time.

        So - I'm simply surprised that a ramdisk makes much difference.

        I was suspicious of the database / lucene building piece - which may
well do fsyncs, and write a journal to try to ensure data integrity, I
can believe that is horribly slow.

> Note: that if you do not have enough memory to do that, you could at
> least move the TMPDIR do a ramdisk. you don't need a big one (not sure
> exactly how much, but I bet 500M should probably do)
> there are some step in helpcontent2 that do a LOT of creation/delete on TMP.

        Right; I guess it might be nice to have an 'strace -f -ttt' log (or Mac
equivalent) of a few minutes of the build - to see what is going on.

        Thanks !

                Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks@novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot