Incredible speed ups on Leopard!?

[Tabitha McNerney]

On 1/2/08, Jordan K. Hubbard <jkh at apple.com> wrote:
>
> [ Resent from correct account, so MacPorts won't bounce it back again ]
> On Jan 2, 2008, at 12:22 PM, Tabitha McNerney wrote:
>
> Has anyone else noticed incredible MacPorts speed up improvements when
> installing various ports?
>
> Here's an example: The same hardware (Xserve Intel 2 x 2 GhZ Dual Core
> Intel). Once this machine was running Tiger Server with MacPorts 1.5.0 and
> I installed the gcc41 port which (if my notes are accurate) took about 88minutes to install from beginning to end (some of the time could have been
> eaten up in the "fetching" of the resource source files). Anyway, the same
> port on Leopard Server on the same machine with MacPort 1.6.0 took me
> roughly 20 minutes to install today. From 88 to 20 minutes is almost
> unheard of. I checked the port files too, to make sure the version of the
> gcc41 port I was installing was the same:
>
> Tiger Server:
>
> gcc41 4.1.2, Revision 2, lang/gcc41 (Variants: universal, darwin_8,
> > darwin_i386, powerpc, odcctools)
> >
>
> Leopard Server:
>
> gcc41 4.1.2, Revision 2, lang/gcc41 (Variants: universal, darwin_8,
> > darwin_i386, powerpc, odcctools)
> >
>
> I presume this is because Leopard and Leopard Server are now leveraging
> the Apple Developer tools with a complete 64-bit wide architecture (both the
> hardware and the software)?
>
>
> No, I think it's because Leopard's Tcl no longer searches an insane search
> path (including network volumes) as part of its startup.  When we made this
> change in Leopard (largely because of pathological performance problems I
> noticed with MacPorts and fs_usage(1)), a full minute was shaved off the
> most basic port operations, including build/install (it's more observable
> with something like "port search").
>

Jordan,

Thank you for providing a reality check (and thanks to Apple for modifying
Leopard's Tcl to speed things up). I wonder then, will having a 64-bit
operating system with 64-bit tools (e.g., Xcode) assist anywhere in the
process of compiling a MacPort (or running a MacPort)? I think I did read in
a much earlier post several weeks ago whereby someone asked a similar
question about gaining 64-bit binaries and I think I recall that the answer
is that its possible (but forgot the details of how -- perhaps just
"automagic" with the gcc compiler provided by Apple with Xcode dev tools?

For what its worth, I'm having quite an enjoyable time using Leopard Server
and am thankful to the MacPorts community for making the transition to
Leopard / Leopard Server quite smooth with MacPorts 1.6.0.

Thanks,

T.M.


- Jordan
>
>
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