[9fans] Why are some apps so slow?

[9fans] Why are some apps so slow?

[John Floren]

Hi everybody, hope this message doesn't come out like a troll.
I'm just wondering why some Plan 9 programs seem to act so slowly.
Acme news is incredibly sluggish, and page takes far longer to display
an image or a doc page than it has any right to. Admittedly, this is
running on a PII machine, but even on one of those, I expect better
performance. Hell, my 486 was better at displaying images.

John
-- 
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" -- Shakespeare, Henry VI

Re: [9fans] Why are some apps so slow?

[Skip Tavakkolian]

where are the images stored?

> Hi everybody, hope this message doesn't come out like a troll.
> I'm just wondering why some Plan 9 programs seem to act so slowly.
> Acme news is incredibly sluggish, and page takes far longer to display
> an image or a doc page than it has any right to. Admittedly, this is
> running on a PII machine, but even on one of those, I expect better
> performance. Hell, my 486 was better at displaying images.

Re: [9fans] Why are some apps so slow?

[Anselm R. Garbe]

On Fri, Sep 22, 2006 at 01:31:12AM -0400, John Floren wrote:
> Hi everybody, hope this message doesn't come out like a troll.
> I'm just wondering why some Plan 9 programs seem to act so slowly.
> Acme news is incredibly sluggish, and page takes far longer to display
> an image or a doc page than it has any right to. Admittedly, this is
> running on a PII machine, but even on one of those, I expect better
> performance. Hell, my 486 was better at displaying images.

This depends on the OS you used on this 486 box and how this OS
has been designed (maybe it wasn't intended to be a distributed
OS).

Regards,
-- 
 Anselm R. Garbe  ><><  www.ebrag.de  ><><  GPG key: 0D73F361

Re: [9fans] Why are some apps so slow?

[erik quanstrom]

you can run stats on your machine with at least load, ether, context, 
memory.  perhaps this will make problem apparent.

what video card/mode are you using? (cat /dev/vgactl)

- erik

Re: [9fans] Why are some apps so slow?

[jmk]

Now that you've completed STEP 1 - ask if anyone knows the
answer - on to STEP 2 - use the tools you have been given to find
out for yourself.

On Fri Sep 22 01:34:39 EDT 2006, slawmaster@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi everybody, hope this message doesn't come out like a troll.
> I'm just wondering why some Plan 9 programs seem to act so slowly.
> Acme news is incredibly sluggish, and page takes far longer to display
> an image or a doc page than it has any right to. Admittedly, this is
> running on a PII machine, but even on one of those, I expect better
> performance. Hell, my 486 was better at displaying images.
> 
> John
> -- 
> "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" -- Shakespeare, Henry VI

Re: [9fans] Why are some apps so slow?

[C H Forsyth]

i run the system on a k6-ii 350 and it's fine,
so it is not inherently slow on smaller machines.

Re: [9fans] Why are some apps so slow?

[Francisco J Ballesteros]

I´ve found that many times there is a lot of latency added because of
multiple

walk, open, read, clunk.

Not that this could be the cause for this problem, but it reminded me
of it.

Anyone actually studied this? Anyone considered replacing this with, say,
put/get rpcs that do it all? In some cases there are multiple read (or write),
rounds, but many times, I see the 4 rpcs just to get a bunch of bytes.
This was a concern for us while using omero across slow network links.

just curiosity, thanks in any case.

On 9/22/06, jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com <jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com> wrote:
> Now that you've completed STEP 1 - ask if anyone knows the
> answer - on to STEP 2 - use the tools you have been given to find
> out for yourself.
>
> On Fri Sep 22 01:34:39 EDT 2006, slawmaster@gmail.com wrote:
> > Hi everybody, hope this message doesn't come out like a troll.
> > I'm just wondering why some Plan 9 programs seem to act so slowly.
> > Acme news is incredibly sluggish, and page takes far longer to display
> > an image or a doc page than it has any right to. Admittedly, this is
> > running on a PII machine, but even on one of those, I expect better
> > performance. Hell, my 486 was better at displaying images.
> >
> > John
> > --
> > "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" -- Shakespeare, Henry VI
>
>

Re: [9fans] Why are some apps so slow?

[Russ Cox]

> Anyone actually studied this? Anyone considered replacing this with, say,
> put/get rpcs that do it all? In some cases there are multiple read (or write),
> rounds, but many times, I see the 4 rpcs just to get a bunch of bytes.
> This was a concern for us while using omero across slow network links.

Of course, one easy solution to this is to keep the file descriptor
open for more than one read or write.  Then it's just one round trip.

Russ

Re: [9fans] Why are some apps so slow?

[Francisco J Ballesteros]

But in many cases the files read are small, and keeping the
fd open would not help. Just curiosity, anyway.

On 9/23/06, Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com> wrote:
> > Anyone actually studied this? Anyone considered replacing this with, say,
> > put/get rpcs that do it all? In some cases there are multiple read (or write),
> > rounds, but many times, I see the 4 rpcs just to get a bunch of bytes.
> > This was a concern for us while using omero across slow network links.
>
> Of course, one easy solution to this is to keep the file descriptor
> open for more than one read or write.  Then it's just one round trip.
>
> Russ
>
>

Re: [9fans] Why are some apps so slow?

[Russ Cox]

> But in many cases the files read are small, and keeping the
> fd open would not help. Just curiosity, anyway.

Why wouldn't keeping the fd open help?
It would get rid of the walk, open, and close,
3 of the 4 messages you were trying to get down to 1.

Rsus

Re: [9fans] Why are some apps so slow?

[Francisco J Ballesteros]

I mean, many times a program reads a small file once.
You have to open it, and once it has been read, you do not
want to read it again. Leaving it open would not help.


On 9/23/06, Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com> wrote:
> > But in many cases the files read are small, and keeping the
> > fd open would not help. Just curiosity, anyway.
>
> Why wouldn't keeping the fd open help?
> It would get rid of the walk, open, and close,
> 3 of the 4 messages you were trying to get down to 1.
>
> Rsus
>
>