Re: OptionalObsoleteFiles.inc completeness

On Fri, 2012-06-01 at 07:20:42 +1000, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On 2012-May-30 13:27:03 +1000, Peter Jeremy <peter_at_rulingia.com> wrote:
> >On 2012-May-29 02:18:25 +0400, Dmitry Marakasov <amdmi3_at_amdmi3.ru> wrote:
> >>Then you should try to profile it - my script basically runs
> >>delete-old delete-old-libs for every knob (131 of them), and it
> >>hadn't taken more than 4 seconds even once.
> >
> >I've done some investigating and the problem is that "xargs -n1"
> >fork()/exec()s /bin/echo on each file (and there are 5538 files for
> >me).  Changing this to "tr ' ' '\n'" reduces "make delete-old" runtime
> >to 1.75s - which is much nicer.  I've checked a variety of other
> >systems running 8.x & 9.x and the 97s seems to be anomalously long so
> >I'll do some more investigating.
> 
> I've tracked the problem down to excessive VM faults caused by
> jemalloc.  Whilst executing /bin/echo, jemalloc mmap()s two 4MiB
> chunks of memory.  Unless you build with MALLOC_PRODUCTION (which I
> hadn't), it then proceeds to verify that both blocks are zero-filled.
> This causes 2048 (unnecessary) page faults (out of a total of 2133).
> When I rebuilt jemalloc with MALLOC_PRODUCTION, this dropped to 87
> page faults (cf 76 an 8.x and 62 on 9.x) and the elapsed time for
> "make delete-old" dropped to slightly more than 8.x & 9.x.
> 
> "xargs -n1" is probably a worst case scenario for jemalloc but this
> probably similarly affects other short-lived processes (and the shell
> scripts that invoke them).  It's a pity that this particular test is a
> compile-time option.
> 
> I still think that saving 5500 fork()/exec() pairs is a good reason
> to switch from "xargs -n1" to "tr ' ' '\n'".

Why is xargs even calling /bin/echo when "utility" is not specified.
Shouldn't it just print a certain number of arguments (one in this
case)?

Uli