Speed/latency issues for development in a Wine environment

[Alan W. Irwin]

Thanks very much Jeff, for providing some independent timing numbers for
startup latency which are an order of magnitude (!) smaller than mine.
So what is different about our wine platforms to cause that huge
difference?  More below.

On 2010-06-19 12:55+1000 Jeff Zaroyko wrote:

>
> Windows:
> $ time gcc --version
> gcc.exe (GCC) 3.4.5 (mingw-vista special r3)
> Copyright (C) 2004 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    0m0.020s
> user    0m0.000s
> sys     0m0.015s
>
> Wine:
> jeffz at genera:~$ WINEPREFIX=/home/jeffz/wine-cpbench time
> ~/git/wine/wine "c:\mingw\bin\gcc" "--version"
> gcc.exe (GCC) 3.4.5 (mingw-vista special r3)
> Copyright (C) 2004 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.
>
> 0.00user 0.01system 0:00.02elapsed 66%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
> 0inputs+0outputs (0major+1567minor)pagefaults 0swaps

So to the level of your measurement precision you are consistently getting
20 ms elapsed time for both Windows and Wine for the gcc --version
experiment on boxes very similar to mine.  For the same experiment (I went
out of my way to use the same syntax you did) I am getting ~150 ms for one X
server and ~300 ms for the other.  So that is an order of magnitude
difference in our results.  When I can reduce my wine application startup
latency to 20 ms, I will be a happy camper, but the question is how can
I do that?

One difference between us is I am using MinGW-4.5.0-1, but it is hard to
believe that the time taken to process the --version option for that has
changed so drastically from your gcc-3.4.5.  Also, I believe the startup
latency on my platform is a general problem on my platform
and nothing to do with gcc.  I
get essentially identical startup latency results with "mingw32-make
--version" and "gcc --version".  "cmake --version" tends to be about 10 per
cent longer than the other two.  Presumeably you have convenient access to
mingw32-make. Do you also get only ~20 ms startup latency for that?

How about file systems?  My experiments were done on ext3.  What filesystem
were you using on the box where you did the wine timing experiment?

The other thing that bothers me is I get the same identical result whether
wineserver is active or not.  Can you confirm that for your wine timing
experiment or is that an unusual result?

Other data here that may be relevant to the comparison with you:

My hardware is 64-bit.

Linux raven 2.6.26-2-amd64 #1 SMP Wed May 12 18:03:14 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I am running 32-bit wine (wine-1.2-rc3 compiled with the -O3 option for
Debian Lenny) which uses the following libraries:

irwin at raven> ldd /home/software/wine/install/bin/wine
         linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xf77a2000)
         libwine.so.1 => /home/software/wine/install/bin/../lib/libwine.so.1 (0xf765d000)
         libpthread.so.0 => /lib32/libpthread.so.0 (0xf7625000)
         libc.so.6 => /lib32/libc.so.6 (0xf74d3000)
         libdl.so.2 => /lib32/libdl.so.2 (0xf74ce000)
         /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf77a3000)

Previously, I got ~50 per cent larger startup latency numbers with the
Debian Lenny package for wine-1.1.42 provided by WineHQ which is why I
switched to to building my own wine-1.2-rc3, but 150 ms with the latter just
doesn't cut it compared to your 20 ms.

Let me know if there is any additional comparison data I can provide.  For
me the important question is what is fundamentally different between our two
software platforms or wine configurations that causes this order of
magnitude difference in startup latency on similar hardware?

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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