Re: Packaged perl slow?

["Marcelo E. Magallon" <mmagallo@debian.org>]

On Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 08:59:49PM +0200, Francesco Paolo Lovergine wrote:

 > >  I've been tracing a problem with a Perl Application I use (kwiki), and
 > >  I'm having trouble understanding why it is so slow.
 > 
 > Did you try different kernel versions?

 Hmm... "yes".  Meaning, on a different machine (AMD Athlon(tm) XP
 1600+) with several different kernels (all of them 2.6) it doesn't make
 much of a difference.  For now I can't take the original machine down
 for a kernel change.

 $ time ./index.cgi > /dev/null 
 real    0m1.045s
 user    0m0.989s
 sys     0m0.051s

 Looking at the profileer, it's spending an awful lot of time here:

  25.1   0.260  0.000     95   0.0027 0.0000  utf8::SWASHNEW

 Looking at the documentation, perlunicode has this to say:

   Interaction with Locales

   Use of locales with Unicode data may lead to odd results.  Currently,
   Perl attempts to attach 8-bit locale info to characters in the range
   0..255, but this technique is demonstrably incorrect for locales that
   use characters above that range when mapped into Unicode.  Perl's Uni-
   code support will also tend to run slower.  Use of locales with Unicode
   is discouraged.

 but I'm not sure what that means.  Is it saying "don't define LC_*
 environment variables"?

 Much of the time is start up time.  Someone else suggested using
 modperl, but kwiki leaks memory in modperl.  There are sure some
 workarounds.

 Given that people on other architectures report better performance with
 equivalent hardware and the same version of perl, I was wondering if
 there's something about Debian's Perl is compiled that might make it
 slower in this scenario.

 Marcelo