Re: [PATCH 0/8] Makefile: make command-list.h 2-5x as fast with -jN

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Oct 21, 2021, 14:34 UTC
Message-ID: <YXF6Wwcvc0vq5ADZ@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <211021.86ilxrmbb9.gmgdl@evledraar.gmail.com>

On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 02:48:24AM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> >> There's subtle dependency issues there as well, and just having a
> >> one-off solution for the the command-list.h doesn't get us closer to
> >> addressing that sibling implementation.
> >
> > So I don't know what "subtle dependency issues" you found here, but this
> > is exactly the kind of complexity it was my goal to avoid.
> 
> But how? I don't see how narrowly making the loop in generate-cmdlist.sh
> gets us closer to generating the "cmds_txt" in the
> Documentation/Makefile.

What I meant is that the work to get everything right in the Makefile to correctly handle dependencies and a partial rebuild can be tricky. For instance, you're still stuck with a big wildcard dependency on Documentation/git*.txt (and a manual list of exclusions in the Makefile) because it's hard in make to do make new dynamic rules based on an existing one (i.e., the list _should_ come from what's in command-list.txt). Or the fact that we apparently need to keep the old script around or cmake anyway.

It's also much slower. Here are from-scratch builds before and after your patch 7:

  $ hyperfine --warmup 1 -p 'make clean' 'make command-list.h'
  Benchmark #1: make command-list.h
    Time (mean ± σ):      1.527 s ±  0.060 s    [User: 1.320 s, System: 0.649 s]
    Range (min … max):    1.433 s …  1.625 s    10 runs
   
  
  $ hyperfine --warmup 1 -p 'make clean' 'make command-list.h'
  Benchmark #1: make command-list.h
    Time (mean ± σ):      2.661 s ±  0.080 s    [User: 2.359 s, System: 1.082 s]
    Range (min … max):    2.481 s …  2.756 s    10 runs

I know that partial builds will offset that in some cases, but it still feels like a step in the wrong direction. Even with a partial build, swapping out "make clean" for "touch Documentation/git-add.txt" takes about 200ms for me. Whereas with the faster version of generate-cmdlist.sh I showed, it takes 150ms.

Now performance isn't everything, and it's possible these partial snippets will be useful in other places. But I'm not sure I see any real advantage in this series, and it seems like we're taking a hit in both performance and complexity in the meantime.

-Peff