Hello,
This week I gave a shot at profiling lintian. I took a large source
package at hand (~400 MB) [1], built it and ran lintian on .changes file
under NYTProf:
$ PERL5OPT=-d:NYTProf bin/lintian -EviI --pedantic ../*.changes
NYTProf highlighted that over 70 % of the runtime was spent in searching
for longest lines in source files as part of
Lintian::Check::Files::SourceMissing and
Lintian::Check::Files::Contents::LineLength checks. I modified them to
use better performing solutions for the same task and managed to
decrease their time share to 32 % for the package in question. This
reduced lintian runtime from 2278s to 820s for the package in question.
I opened three MRs for lintian with these changes [2][3][4].
This gives me some hope that parts of lintian could be made to perform
better. Next step would be to run lintian under NYTProf for more diverse
packages. UDD table of worst performing packages [5] (thanks Lucas!) is
a great starting point to do so.
Best wishes,
Andrius
[1] this is a local package with non-free content which I use
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/merge_requests/506
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/merge_requests/508
[4] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/merge_requests/509
[5] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2024/05/msg00152.html
