[Ecls-list] ECL shootout

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:45 PM, Gabriel Dos
Reis<gdr at integrable-solutions.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Juan Jose
> Garcia-Ripoll<juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>>> I'm not claiming that use is typical of performance problems in ECL.  I'm
>>> just offering data points (e.g. not artificially made up.)
>>
>> It is a pity that OpenAxiom is such a complex beast that I would not
>> know where to begin for profiling it.
>
> Tell me more about how you do it (e.g. profile a standalone
> ECL-based program), and I'll try to see how I can make that happen
> for building the OpenAxiom compiler. (I do not use SLIME.)

What I do normally for a full profile is
1) Build ECL with debug flags (-g -O2 seems ok) so that the compiler
and linker keep track of function names.
2) Tweak my makefiles so that COMPILE-FILE gets a couple extra
arguments :C-FILE T :H-FILE T that keep the C files around. This is
needed sometimes to better locate the bottlenecks.
3) Run the program I want to profile and inspect the logs

For a very big program this sometimes gives an idea of what are the
bottlenecks from the ECL library. However, I also like to profile test
cases, small functions or pieces of code. The Gabriel benchmarks are
ideal for that.

Step 3 could be done with gprof or with OSX's Shark, but the latter
does not work well with things that take a lot of time: it profiles
best small functions, small pieces of code that take at most a few
minutes.

Juanjo

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28006 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com