Re: Slowdown when running gconftool-2 --makefile-(un)install-rule

[Jan de Groot <jan jgc homeip net>]

On Sun, 2006-03-05 at 22:46 +0100, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> Le dimanche 05 mars 2006 à 22:30 +0100, Jan de Groot a écrit :
> > In archlinux, we used gconftool-2 --makefile-uninstall-rule on
> > pre_upgrade of all our packages with schema files, while using
> > --makefile-install-rule on post_upgrade or post_install on all schema
> > files installed by the package.
> > While such a process takes 10-15 seconds max per package to install with
> > gconf 2.12, it takes over a minute or two to install packages with quite
> > some GConf schemas on 2.13.
> > 
> > I guess the merged database things cause this big slowdown, as it
> > generates a merge on every run of gconftool-2. What options do we have
> > to speed this process up a bit?
> 
> Hi,
> 
> The Debian maintainer of gconf has sent a patch about that:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=333353

Wow, that's quite an improvement. libgnome for example:
Run gconftool-2 in a for loop:
real    1m31.711s
user    0m56.800s
sys     0m5.952s

Feed the whole ${schemas[ ]} array to gconftool-2:
real    0m51.198s
user    0m28.254s
sys     0m3.660s

The same, now with the patch:
real    0m8.158s
user    0m4.104s
sys     0m0.492s

This is a gigantic speed improvement. This is tested on an Athlon XP
2800+ with 1GB RAM on ext3. With the slowest result, I can even see
kjournald and gconftool-2 hanging in D status while running top.