second call for feedback on Naiad design

[Matthew Fulmer]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 07:08:12PM -0800, Craig Latta wrote:
> 
> Hi Matthew--
> 
>  > I have a suspicion that this rewrite has sped up the source code
>  > access speed dramatically, which should make the browser much
>  > snappier and Monticollo snapshotting much faster. Could you
>  > comment on a rough estimate of this speedup? I think it is a
>  > feature worth advertising.
> 
>       Good point... I haven't done any measurements yet, though. This is 
> effectively comparing localhost network access from RAM to filesystem 
> access. I imagine it would come down to which way invoked more paging on 
> the part of the host system's memory management. My guess is that the 
> network case would be faster, but not amazingly so these days.
> 
>       You experience unduly slow speeds with the file-based case now?

No. It's not the filesystem access that is slow. It is that the
current source code storage format reads the file character by
character, looking for the terminating !, and doing utf-8
conversion the whole way. 95% of the time in a MC snapshot is
spent in testing the source file characters for the terminating
! character. I immagine you do much more in bulk rather than
character by character. The format of the .sources file is
horrible for access speed.

-- 
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/