[lug] gv questions

[David L. Anselmi]

Gary Hodges wrote:
[...]
> Yes, I was using KDE with SuSE.  No idea about free memory.  For what 
> its worth I just ran the same thing on two other machines:
> 
> Opteron 244 SMP w/4GB RAM Sarge 64 install
> Athlon MP 2000+ SMP w/2GB RAM Sarge install
> 
> My Machine is a single Athlon XP 2600+ w/512 MB RAM Kubuntu 5.10 install
> 
> My machine and the Athlon the speed is the same.  The Opteron seems to 
> render each page at least twice as fast.

If there's a huge difference in video cards between the Opteron and the 
two Athlons, I could be wrong about card making a difference.  If the 
cards are relatively similar I think you can rule that out.

There could be a difference between the way SuSE and Debian compile gv. 
  Perhaps SuSE uses more optimization or a more specific CPU setting 
(e.g., k7 rather than 386).  Looking at the source packages should tell 
you (though you have to get into the guts a little).

[...]
> Funny thing is as I page through my ps doc I'm wondering if I really am 
> remembering how quickly SuSE and gv used to render each page.  I feel 
> almost certain it was much faster, but at the same time I don't _trust_ 
> my memory as much as I used to, though I think it is as _good_ as ever.

If I were an admin and you were one of my users complaining I'd ignore 
you until you showed me numbers.  So unless you can get an objective 
comparison I wouldn't worry about it.  There's too much that could be 
causing the difference, including the size of the doc or the way it was 
generated between now and what you last looked at on SuSE.

<OT>
At work I recently had a developer tell me we couldn't package Java code 
as a .jar because there were performance problems if we (someday) got 
into multi-threaded or distributed applications.  I asked if he measured 
the performance of our current system and he said no.  So I know there 
are no specs for performance--if there were he would have to measure to 
make sure we're in spec.  So I'm pushing for using .jars and if he comes 
back and says ".jars are too slow" I'll tell him "go away, we're in spec".

This is in an environment where some people are unhappy it takes several 
minutes to scan a directory with hundreds of thousands of files over NFS 
but others are happy when their database intensive job finishes in under 
30 minutes.  So worrying about a few seconds of latency loading classes 
is clearly premature optimization (especially considering the build and 
install efficiencies we hope to achieve by overhauling the system under 
cover of "switching to jars".
</OT>

Dave