Re: Aptitude question

[Miles Bader <miles.bader@necel.com>]

Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> writes:
> When you say that normal operation is getting slower, do you mean just
> the load time or its overall performance?  The time required to load
> in all the state files is a bit long, but once they're loaded the
> program seems to run reasonably quickly to me.

The really problematic thing is indeed the state-file loading time; it
seems to take 30 - 40 seconds on my machine (with no disk I/O as the
files are already cached by the kernel).

Normal operation is generally OK, though some searches (e.g. "~dfoo")
are so slow as to be almost useless -- especially given that it's
"i-search", so a super-slow search gets repeated for every key as you
type the search string!

>   The main thing that changed recently that would impact the program's speed
> under normal use is the switch to using Unicode internally, which means that
> many string manipulations take 4x as long, and input strings (e.g., from
> package descriptions) have to be decoded before they're used.

Do you know if the package/state files so large that it's really running
against fundamental memory bandwidth problems?  I've noticed (in my own
programs) that some standard C++ library code, e.g. reading from
io-streams, seems suspiciously slow (though I've not confirmed this with
measurements)...

Thanks,

-Miles

-- 
o The existentialist, not having a pillow, goes everywhere with the book by
  Sullivan, _I am going to spit on your graves_.