[darcs-devel] a couple of quick timings

[Petr Rockai]

Hi,

zooko <zooko at zooko.com> writes:
>> Also, what's the memory use look like? Could this be an effect of  
>> swapping?
>
> No it can't, because I don't have swap on this machine.  :-)
>
> I know that the memory use is below 500 MB, or else it would have  
> crashed because I have only 500 MB on this machine.  :-)
Not sure what OS are you using, but at least Linux will still work if
you are very tight with memory and have no swap. It will just work
extremely slowly, since all it can swap is code pages (which are in
the executables so they don't need extra swap space). It's usual that
when you have no swap and run out of memory on Linux, trivial
operations can take extremely long time. Please make sure this is not
a memory problem, since otherwise the timing is fairly worthless (and
the issue is really in memory usage)... Also, checking what kind of
load is on the machine (with say top) could help -- is it
CPU-intensive or IO-intensive workload? Or is it mostly idling?

Yours,
    Petr.

PS: Was your ghc test from the other mail on the same machine? Running
out of memory without swap could explain that timing as
well. (Actually, swapless machines get much slower on
nearly-out-of-memory than the ones with swap area, if that was not
clear from the previous text.)

-- 
Peter Rockai | me()mornfall!net | prockai()redhat!com
 http://blog.mornfall.net | http://web.mornfall.net

"In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be
 indented six feet downward and covered with dirt."
     -- Blair P. Houghton on the subject of C program indentation