1.5.97 first impression

[Kevin Finn]

Rob Browning wrote:
> 
> Guile 1.4 is substantially better, and I'd recommend it -- it's
> especially notable for faster loading which is one of the things
> that's probably biting you.  Guile's actually pretty easy to
> build/install, and I'd be happy to help if you need it.  Just ask
> here, directly, or on guile-user.
> 

     Upgrading to guile 1.4 made things a little faster once the splash
screen came up (1-2 seconds rather than 5-6), but the time from starting
the program until the splash screen appears is still the same, about 12
seconds.

> > Okay I'll have a look at it with strace.  Maybe it is stalling on
> > something really stupid like name resolution.
> 
> There was apparently also some issue with guppi -- I think maybe it
> was reading from /dev/random, and so it won't finish until the entropy
> pool has been full enough to generate all the random numbers it
> needs.  If things speed up when you move the mouse furiously, then
> you'll know that's it :>

     Although I'm not the original person you were replying to, I did
take a stab at stracing it.  I do see reads of /dev/urandom (rather than
/dev/random), but furious mouse movement doesn't seem to get things
loading any faster than leaving it still.  With a cursory inspection of
the strace, the only thing that sticks out is a ton of calls to
time(NULL) and times - I assume this is while creating the in-core
splits or transactions(xaccGUIDNew)?  In some cases there are stretches
of times calls which suck up several seconds in a row.  As someone else
mentioned, the startup process does send my load average up to .96 or
so.  A brief chronology of events:

01:03:15.982797 execve("/usr/local/bin/gnucash", ["gnucash"], [/* 51
vars */]) = 0

(first scm file)
01:03:16.773352 stat("/usr/share/guile/site/init.scm", 0xbffff480) = -1
ENOENT

(first gnucash scm file)
01:03:17.079993 open("/usr/local/share/gnucash/scm/bootstrap.scm",
O_RDONLY) = 3

(first moves towards loading my data)
01:03:31.193535 stat("/home/kevin/finance", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0770,
st_size=14336, ...}) = 0

     Somewhere around 01:03:36 it actually loads, and I clicked "Exit". 
I'm not quite sure where the line is in the trace, though.  I can
provide the whole trace if anyone is interested.

    While I'm thinking about it, has anyone else noticed that page up
and page down in the help browser goes two pages at once, or is it just
me?


-- 

Kevin Finn
kevinfinn@mediaone.net