Speed/latency issues for development in a Wine environment

[Mike Kaplinskiy]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 4:35 PM, Alan W. Irwin
<irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca> wrote:
> To introduce myself to this list, I am a complete Wine newbie with no
> Windows experience at all, but I do have years of experience developing
> software on Linux, and in the interests of testing that software on a free
> Windows platform, I have recently been using the combination of Windows
> native versions of MinGW and CMake to build and test applications and
> libraries under Wine. That is, I run a Windows version of cmake under wine
> to configure Makefiles followed by running a Windows version of MinGW make
> under Wine (which in turn runs MinGW gcc and other applications under Wine
> to build and test the software).
>
> So far this idea is going rather well, but I have run into some issues which
> I have been reporting on the wine-users mailing list. I find such
> preliminary discussion useful to help prepare a good bug report, but
> following a suggestion from Alexandre Julliard, I am moving the discussion
> of these issues here.
>
> Since at least some of you have already seen my posts on wine-users, I
> will only summarize the issues as I currently see them.
>
> The rest of this post concerns a slow software build issue I have discovered
> under Wine, and I will deal with a second issue in a later post.
>
> The issue is that Wine builds of software take roughly a factor of 5 longer
> than the equivalent Linux builds.  This issue appears to be caused mostly by
> command startup latency.  What I mean by that phrase is
>
> wine cmake --version
>
> (and the "--version" option for many commands you can run under wine) take
> roughly 150 ms (with wine-1.2-rc3 built with the -O3 option and running that
> wine version with WINEDEBUG='-all' and wineserver -p) to complete while
> Linux versions of the same commands require 1 ms to complete.
>
> It is a startup latency in the commands run under wine rather than a startup
> latency issue with the wine command itself because that command returns much
> faster than 150 ms if you give it an unknown command.
>
> Because many thousands of commands (e.g., "gcc"; several "cmake -E" variants
> per gcc command to help report progress; figure out dependencies, etc.; and
> various further make commands generated by the initial make command) are
> used to complete a typical build (say of cmake itself or PLplot), the
> startup latency for each of those commands accumulates and is a major factor
> which slows down the build (by roughly a factor of 5) compared to the
> equivalent Linux build.  So a reduction of the command startup latency under
> Wine by an order of magnitude should largely solve the problem.
>
> I find the command startup latency depends very much on what X server I am
> using. Of course, the actual commands I am using (cmake, MinGW make, MinGW
> gcc, etc.) to build software under wine have nothing to do with X.  So I am
> hoping if I build a stripped down version of wine configured to ignore X and
> all other systems (sound, etc.) that are not required for builds, then I
> might achieve the reduced command startup latency that I need.
>
> Before I try that, however, is there some less brute-force way to
> reduce command startup latency?
>
> Alan
> __________________________
> Alan W. Irwin
>
> Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
> University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).
>
> Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
> for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
> package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
> Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
> (lbproject.sf.net).
> __________________________
>
> Linux-powered Science
> __________________________
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 14:10:31 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Alan W. Irwin <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca>
> To: wine-users at winehq.org
> Subject: Re: [Wine] Speed/latency issues for development in a Wine
> environment
>
> On 2010-06-11 18:09-0700 Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>
> The previous timing numbers were done with wine-1.1.42.  Following a
> suggestion made off-list to me, I have built wine-1.2-rc3 today (with
> CFLAG=-O3) and immediately noticed the start-up latency for simple commands
> (e.g., cmake --version) was reduced from about 0.25 s to about 0.15 s. I
> don't know how the previous Debian wine-1.1.42 packages were optimized so
> that difference may just be due to an optimization difference or an actual
> improvement in the Wine code from 1.1.42 to 1.2-rc3. However, to see how -O3
> optimized wine-1.2-rc3 does with the full tests, I have redone my timing
> tests for I. (cmake), II (make install), and III (make install latency) and
> the following reductions have been observed.
>
>> Wine I.
>> wine at raven> time wine cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" \
>> "-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=z:/home/wine/cmake/install1" \
>> z:/home/software/cmake/cmake-2.8.1_patched/ >& cmake.out
>>
>> real    14m17.124s
>
> ==> real    8m18.041s
>
>> Wine II.
>>
>> wine at raven> time wine mingw32-make install >& make_install.out
>>
>> real    20m13.421s
>
> ==>
> real    12m4.198s
>
>> Wine III.
>> wine at raven> time wine mingw32-make install >& make_install.out1
>>
>> real    1m39.018s
>
> ==>
> real    0m51.045s
>
> For reference here are the corresponding Linux numbers which are still
> much better than the corresponding Wine-1.2-rc3 results.
>
>> Linux I.
>>
>> wine at raven> time cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" \
>> "-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/wine/cmake/install_linux" \
>> /home/software/cmake/cmake-2.8.1_patched/ >& cmake.out
>>
>> real    0m34.015s
>> Linux II.
>>
>> wine at raven> time make install >& make_install.out
>>
>> real    2m12.805s
>> Linux III.
>>
>> wine at raven> time make install >& make_install.out1
>>
>> real    0m0.869s
>
> To summarize these findings, it appears that changes in startup latency for
> simple commands strongly correlates with timing results for build steps I,
> II, and III on Wine. This makes sense since we know that several thousand
> commands are run for, e.g., build step II so startup latency of hundreds of
> milliseconds per command must be a real build performance killer.
>
> So what can be done to reduce the simple startup latency from the current
> ~150 ms on Wine down much closer to the Linux startup latency for the same
> commands which is typically 1 ms?  Simple commands requiring 150 ms to start
> must have an awful lot of extra start baggage.  Is all that baggage really
> needed for command-line commands such as cmake, mingw32-make, gcc, etc.?
>
> Alan
> __________________________
> Alan W. Irwin
>
> Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
> University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).
>
> Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
> for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
> package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
> Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
> (lbproject.sf.net).
> __________________________
>
> Linux-powered Science
> __________________________
>
>
>

To make sure your numbers are somewhat consistent, you might want to
do `wineserver -p; wine notepad` before tests to make sure the
wineserver is loaded. It should help with timing of a single app
startup, but probably won't help in the cmake case.

Mike.