And here I am all the way up at ~600ms startup lag ($EMPLOYER has a busted
Python3 distro that adds a lot of ms each interpreter start-up), but very
low prompt lag.

*Zach Riggle*


On Tue, Nov 30, 2021 at 2:28 AM Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11/30/21, Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 11/30/21, Roman Perepelitsa <roman.perepelitsa@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Tue, Nov 30, 2021 at 3:30 AM Zach Riggle <zachriggle@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> The benchmark I used
> >>>
> >>> $ hyperfine 'zsh -i -l "exit 0"'
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Obviously this is not the BEST benchmark [for checking shell startup
> >>> time]
> >>
> >> Obviously. It's the worst or at least a strong contender for the title.
> >
> > I think it's fine to do this (assuming he actually meant -i -l -c
> > "exit 0" (missing -c in the quoted command)), if you don't do any
> > weird stuff in your startup files (like you mention in your "how not
> > to benchmark" section). Assuming your startup files are synchronous,
> > the above will tell you how long it takes to execute your init file
> > plus some other overhead, so if you do something and the number is
> > lower, the thing you did will indeed make startup faster. If your
> > startup files are not synchronous, then obviously nothing I said
> > applies and everything you say is true. BTW, the above command can
> > easily be improved for worseness:
> > % time (repeat 1000; zsh -ic exit)
> >
> >> Since you care about interactive zsh performance, at least skim
> >> through the homepage of zsh-bench. It'll save you time.
> >
> > % ./zsh-bench
> > ==> benchmarking login shell of mikaelh ...
> > zsh-bench: cannot find prompt; make sure it contains hostname or the
> > last part of the current directory
> >
> > Sadly no time was saved :(.
>
> Got it running by changing prompt_pat to %,
> first_command_lag_ms=48.233
> first_prompt_lag_ms=33.816
> exit_time_ms=32.177
>
> I'd say these values are fairly comparable :).
>
> It would be very useful to have an option to benchmark normal
> interactive shells instead of login shells btw, my profile runs stuff
> like fortune which is obviously pretty slow in comparison to startup
> code, and not at all interesting to benchmark. The  quoted times in
> this mail is with all the -l removed.
>
> Also, you recommend against zcompiling .zshrc in your document, but
> first_command_lag_ms=56.709
> first_prompt_lag_ms=42.367
> exit_time_ms=40.885
>
> Increasing startup time by 33% seems like a bad tradeoff to me, then
> again, I know exactly how things work and am not likely to make the
> mistake you mention.
>
> --
> Mikael Magnusson
>
>