Re: Anti-bloat side project

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 05:37:39PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 11:38:05PM +0200, Szabolcs Nagy wrote:
> > * Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx> [2011-06-27 17:19:09 -0400]:
> > > Bleh. Has there been any serious work to document the causes and how
> > > the code could be changed to fix the syscall bloat though? Or just
> > > preliminat strace and wc -l?
> > 
> > most of the syscalls are due to python module imports check
> > 100 different locations before finding the good one
> > 
> > imho they measured it and concluded that with modern
> > filesystem caching this does not matter much..
> 
> Well they're wrong. Even if the syscall did nothing but enter and
> leave kernelspace, it would still be very expensive. Using a module
> cache/registry of some sort could solve the problem, or they could
> first tackle all the non-open() syscalls which still make up a heavy
> share of the cost..

Of course a better question is... why does "hello world" need to load
any modules anyway? Perhaps a best first step to fixing the problem
would be to demodularize and static link any module that will always
be loaded...

Rich