Re: [PATCH 1/9] git_config_set: fix off-by-two

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Apr 3, 2018, 15:47 UTC
Message-ID: <nycvar.QRO.7.76.6.1804031744220.5026@qfpub.tvgsbejvaqbjf.bet>
In-Reply-To: <CACsJy8Bt3AEZmjudL+scXqOC_oW1WtU0_QZVD9PM+drGbEBeVw@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Duy,

On Tue, 3 Apr 2018, Duy Nguyen wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 11:31 AM, Johannes Schindelin
> <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> > It is very frustrating to spend that much time with only little gains
> > here and there (and BusyBox-w32 is simply not robust enough yet, apart
> > from also not showing a significant improvement in performance).
> 
> You still use busybox-w32?

Yes.

> It's amazing that people still use it after the linux subsystem comes.

I use WSL myself. But you need to realize that WSL is only available on Windows 10 (many users still use Windows 7), and it is a little tricky to get to work in Docker containers, I heard, so I did not even try.

Also, many Windows users are unfamiliar with Linux, and forcing them to learn and install a Linux distribution on their machine when all they want is to use Git is a bit... much.

> busybox has a lot of commands built in (i.e. no new processes) and
> unless rmyorston did something more, the "fork" in ash shell should be
> as cheap as it could be: it simply serializes data and sends to the new
> process.

Yes, I had the pleasure of reading that code.

It might surprise you, but I had to come up with quite a bit of patches to make the test suite pass. And it does not really pass, as I randomly get hangs...

> If performance does not improve, I guess the process creation cost
> dominates. There's not much we could do except moving away from the
> zillion processes test framework: either something C-based or another
> scripting language (ok I don't want to bring this up again)

There is no need to guess. I now have .pdb files, and once I have a good example of a shell script construct that is particularly slow, and once I find some time to work on it, I will dig into the bottlenecks.

Ciao, Dscho