On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 2:47 AM, Alexandre <
airmind gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Last year's Summer of Code required us to make weekly reports about our
> work, it was good to put things into perspective and to show everybody what
> we were doing. This year there is no such requirement, but I'll try to make
> reports as much as possible.
> This weekend I tried to worked on GSoC, because in the next few weeks I'll
> have very little time.
>
> I used cProfile to look at the Conduit initialization time. In my computer,
> most of time was spent getting device properties from HAL and the rest was
> spent loading all the modules. With 31 files (not counting dependencies) and
> 62 dataproviders getting loaded, things can get slow. And eventually, all we
> need at initialization are factories to find out what new dataproviders to
> create.
> The original HAL factory behaviour when probing for devices was also getting
> problems, because it retrieves all properties from all devices, them it
> checks which are needed. The only module requiring that behaviour, as far I
> could find, is the Synce module. I was able to modify it's behaviour so that
> it is much faster now, but I'm unsure it is working correctly.
>
> The problem of loading all modules at startup I solved by creating a module
> cache. This cache is first created when all modules are loaded and it
> includes the modification time of each file, so we can reload the cache when
> something changes. This cache is kept in the user's config directory. So far
> I could not think a situation where this cache would cause problems, but I'm
> still cautious about it. With the help of the ModuleWrapper architecture in
> place and some hacks, I was able to make Conduit recognize all dataproviders
> without loading any module file and import these modules on demand, when a
> dataprovider instance is required. I also split factories from dataproviders
> in modules that had both of them, so now we can load all factories without
> loading any dataprovider.
> Most of places it is transparent wheter the module has been loaded or it's
> information was in the cache, except in factories, that now have to load
> dataproviders only when required.
> I do not have numbers, but now opening Conduit is much faster and everything
> seems to still be working.
>
> Of course, this is all very experimental. I'll push this work into a branch
> as soon as possible.
>
> Alexandre Rosenfeld
>
