Benchmarking XEmacs (was Re: Beware of modules.)

sb> Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic(a)srce.hr&gt; writes in sb> xemacs-beta(a)xemacs.org: sb> Not to me, but I won't push the matter. I can't perceive the difference between Mule and no-Mule for most of the fundamental editing and redisplay operations even on an ancient Sparc ELC or a 80486/50MHz (both are XEmacs 20.4, though), including stuff like sort-lines. Once a Japanese font is loaded, changing to that font is no slower in XEmacs than in a kterm, perceptually. If Hrvoje can perceive those differences as a half-order of magnitude, he's quick. I doubt he'd notice any difference using a Mule XEmacs for `xemacs -batch -l dunnet' ;-) Where I do perceive differences is in large buffers that need to be randomly accessed (eg, a threaded VM folder). There the slowdown is huge, although I'm not sure how much is due to Mule and how much is due to VM's lack of optimization for non-English. Eg, my "Student Advising" folder has several hundred MIME BASE64-encoded-words for Japanese names and subjects, and every time its Summary gets resorted or something a "Decoding base64 ..." message gets echoed a few hundred times, which does slow things down I bet. I wonder how many other lisp packages are written so that in their default configuration they write scads of informational messages or otherwise respond to "unusual" occurrances that aren't so unusual in environments where Mule is essential. Like BASE64 decoding, which is used for every message header that contains Japanese. I'm sure VM warns about this because in an ASCII world base64 decoding is used mostly on objects like images where the operation itself will take a long time. Decoding 4 JIS characters doesn't deserve mention IMHO but YMMV :-) I suspect it's hard to write a good benchmark for this. -- 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."