Startup time, a short review & discussion

John M McIntosh johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com
Fri Aug 1 22:49:02 UTC 2003


On Friday, August 1, 2003, at 12:34  PM, Lex Spoon wrote:

> John M McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> wrote:
>> I've been glancing at squeak startup time on the mac this morning and
>> have a few observations. Actually I have noticed on
>> windows the images "SNAP' open, but take seconds on the mac and I'd
>> like to fix that... What I've discovered is that
>>
>> 13.3% of the time goes to initializeObjectMemory actually
>> (adjustAllOopsBy:by:)
>> 4.3% of the time goes to flushExternalPrimitives.
>> (ignore the rest because I'm not sure now to fix yet).
>>
>
> This seems odd.  The image is only 5-30 megabytes most of the time, and
> so scanning through shouldn't take but a fraction of a second each  
> time.
>  Also, is 13% really going to be a satisfactory, even if you get rid of
> it?  It sounds like you are observing a huge difference.

Well I'm kind more interested in the case where the image is 700MB or  
so.  The times
above are CPU times, so later last night I clocked real time and found  
that most of this
time is in the last 1/10ths of a second in the startup time.   
Interestingly enough I discovered

a) menu building on os-x is incredibly expensive, moving the menu  
redraw got back 0.1ths of seconds
b) the pthread that is started to run the millisecond clock could be  
started after loading the image, not before.

I'm still looking to understand where all the real time goes.


--
======================================================================== 
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John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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