A few days ago, somebody complained about KDE being slower on Redhat 9 than it was in earlier versions. I don't know if my experience is related, but it confirms something bizarre is going on in Redhat 9.
I just switched from a Pentium 500Mhz running Redhat 8, to a Pentium 1500 running Redhat 9. Remember how Hspell 0.5 took ages to run, and Hspell 0.6 is much much faster to start up? Well, being in love with that fact ( ;)) I wanted to see just how quickly it runs on my new fast machine. On my old machine, it took it 0.3 seconds to start up (hspell /dev/null). I expected it to take 0.1 seconds (CPU time) to start on the new computer, but... It still took 0.3 seconds! I started cursing the fake CPU I probably have on the new machine, and the bugs I probably have in Hspell, before I had an epiphany: what if some dynamic-linking issues slowed hspell's running, and it wasn't hspell itself which is slow? So I recomiled hspell staticly (-static, i.e., without shared libraries) on both machines. Lo and behold, Hspell now takes just 0.23 seconds on the old machine, and 0.095 seconds on the new machine. So, apparently, on Redhat 8 the dynamic linking added 21% to "hspell /dev/null"'s static running time, while on Redhat 9, the dynamic linking added 200% (!!!) to the running time of the static program. In absolute terms, 0.2 extra CPU seconds were wasted on Redhat 9, and this is on my new fast machine - on an old machine the added time would have been enormous. But why is this happening? And why does it effect hspell, and not, say "cat /dev/null"? One thing I noticed is that when I do "ldd" to hspell (or cat, or anything), I don't get /lib/i686/... like I got in Redhat 8 - instead I get some /lib/tls/.... What is that? setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH to /lib/i686 made hspell very speedy again - 0.12 seconds - back to the acceptable 20% overhead for dynamic linking. Does anybody know what these "tls" version of the C library are? Why are they so much slower to load? Or is there another explanation to the problems I'm seeing? Thanks for any insights, Nadav. -- Nadav Har'El | Saturday, Nov 8 2003, 14 Heshvan 5764 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Seen on the back of a dump truck: http://nadav.harel.org.il |<---PASSING SIDE . . . . . SUICIDE---> ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
