[rucksack-devel] rucksack performance

[Cyrus Harmon]

On Jan 11, 2007, at 11:23 PM, Arthur Lemmens wrote:

> [Replying to the list.]
>
>> Oh, while I'm at it, one thing i was thinking about is the nature of
>> indices. One of the nice things in RDBMSes is that you can, say,
>> create a whole bunch of rows and then index them after the fact,
>> rather than having the index in place from the get go (and, more
>> importantly, while doing the insertion). Have you thought about the
>> implications of such a strategy for rucksack? would it make sense to
>> have unindexed slots and then redefine the class to have indices
>> after the instances have been created?
>
> This should already work now.  Have a look at the function REPLACE- 
> SLOT-INDEX,
> for example.  Just add an :INDEX foo option to a slot, and existing
> instances will be re-indexed automatically.

Ok, now we're getting somewhere. removing the indices seems to help  
greatly. We'll see how it goes adding them back once all is said and  
done, but this looks promising.

> At least that's the idea.  If it doesn't work, I'd like to hear about
> it.

I'll certainly post the results when this is done.

Since the index code seems to be the bottleneck here, it would be  
good to spend some time optimizing the index code as well. Also, some  
API support for disabling indexing might be nice. Redefining the  
defclass forms seems to be a bit "extreme".

Cyrus