Re: gitk (or tcl/tk) slow to start?

From: Eli Barzilay <eli@barzilay.org>
Date: May 18, 2010, 02:27 UTC
Message-ID: <19441.64268.762782.215315@winooski.ccs.neu.edu>
In-Reply-To: <4BF12DA6.9090709@drmicha.warpmail.net>

On May 17, Michael J Gruber wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> Eli Barzilay venit, vidit, dixit 17.05.2010 12:58:
> > Every time I run gitk when I didn't use it for a while, it takes a
> > long time to start (more than 30 seconds) with no visible cpu load.  I
> > tried to strace it, and the result shows that the time is spent
> > stat()ing my whole /usr/lib directory:
> > 
> >   ...
> >   stat("/usr/lib/libelf-0.131.so", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=87496, ...}) = 0
> >   stat("/usr/lib/libungif.so.4", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=2444, ...}) = 0
> >   stat("/usr/lib/libtiff.so.3.8.2", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=360268, ...}) = 0
> >   ...
> > 
> > Is this expected?  Anything that can be done to avoid it?
> 
> I don't expect stat'ing /usr/lib to take 30s. How large is it (file
> size and count)?

I've done some more counting -- the most number of system calls (as tracked by strace) are 2968 reads, 4582 lstats, and 6520 stats. And it looks like it's recursively scanning /lib, /usr/lib, and /usr/share for all *.tcl files. stracing `wish' shows 11000 l/stats -- so I guess that the problem is there and not in gitk. Trying wish on a fedora 12 machine, I see only ~350 {,f,l}stat64 calls, and gitk starts as fast as I'd expect it to.

Oh well, I was hoping that someone knows some bit that needs flipping or updating to get it to work faster -- I guess it's one more reason to finally upgrade the F7 machine...

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!