Re: Benchmarking XEmacs (was Re: Beware of modules.)

Hrvoje> I use non-Mule XEmacs every day. As soon as I compile Hrvoje> with Mule to test it, stuff like `M-x gnus' or editing My guess is that you're running afoul of order N*N algorithms in your typical usage, as Martin pointed out. I don't know how Mule caches markers and things like that; I can certainly imagine that threading operations on a "folder-in-buffer" messaging app could easily turn constant-time (for non-Mule XEmacs) "head of substring" operations into an order lg N operation by eg binary search of a beginning of line cache, and the worst case would be an order N "count from the top". I would guess that threading a file which is not close to totally ordered in a way compatible with the thread partial order would make most caching algorithms pretty ineffective, because they are going to assume buffer position access is constant time. This isn't true for Mule, unless it implements a smart algorithm for buffer position access. So I'm not surprised that starting Gnus and doing messaging with Mule is slow. Anyway, I see the same in VM. Hrvoje> tasks or whatever become incredibly slow. Perhaps there Hrvoje> is another explanation for that, but I can't think of any. It must be something in your usage pattern. I use a Mule XEmacs heavily everyday, and long ago gave up regularly building a non-Mule XEmacs precisely because I can't tell the difference in speed, except in VM. Since about 30% of my mail contains Japanese, I have no choice there. I am rather surprised that you find that "editing tasks or whatever" become incredibly slow. I just don't see that in general, not even on slow machines. If you should have occasion to build and test a Mule XEmacs, I would be very pleased if you would keep these observations in mind and filter your own observations again with an eye to non-messaging applications and general text editing. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ What are those two straight lines for? "Free software rules."