Speed/latency issues for development in a Wine environment

Alan W. Irwin irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca
Thu Jun 17 19:05:08 CDT 2010


On 2010-06-17 17:07-0400 Mike Kaplinskiy wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 4:35 PM, Alan W. Irwin
>> 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.  [...]
>> 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?

>
> 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.

I don't think I have access to notepad, but I assume that was just your
template for any wine app I am timing.  I agree timing results depend
strongly on what has been previously cached in memory so the startup latency
timing tests, I report e.g.,

wine at raven> time wine gcc --version
gcc.exe (GCC) 4.5.0
Copyright (C) 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.


real    0m0.143s
user    0m0.088s
sys     0m0.020s

wine at raven> time wine lxxxx
wine: cannot find L"C:\\windows\\system32\\lxxxx.exe"

real    0m0.011s
user    0m0.004s
sys     0m0.008s

wine at raven> time gcc --version
gcc (Debian 4.3.2-1.1) 4.3.2
Copyright (C) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.


real    0m0.001s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.004s

are all quoted for the second run of the command with "wineserver -p"
running and with "export WINEDEBUG='all'" set. That typical difference
between ~150 ms startup latency on wine versus ~1 ms startup latency on
Linux is what I need to reduce in order to obtain reasonable build speeds on
Wine.

Ideas?

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
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