Subject: pkgsrc speed
To: None <pkgsrc-users@NetBSD.org>
From: Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv84@gmail.com>
List: pkgsrc-users
Date: 06/21/2007 23:35:20
Hi,

[ Please CC me any replies as I'm not subscribed to this list now. ]

I've been configuring a machine, an AMD K6 600 with 512MB of RAM, by  
installing NetBSD and building some packages.  I have been scared by  
the extremely long time vim-gtk2 has taken to build (alongside all of  
its dependencies, that is); I remembered building gtk2 on "old"  
machines was slow, but I couldn't imagine things had got so worse.

The thing is I suspected most of this slowdown came from pkgsrc  
(aside from gtk2's code growth, which is also the reason).  So I did  
a very simple test.

I timed how long it took to build gtk2 by running 'make' inside the  
pkgsrc's directory.  This was *after* I had ran 'make patch' (I now  
realize I should have ran 'make wrapper' or something like that, but  
can't try it now and the results shouldn't be too different).  The  
timings I got are:

real 46m40.899s user 32m.52.636s sys 12m54.547s

Then I tried the same build (configure+make) without pkgsrc.  I used  
the same patches present in pkgsrc for the test.  The results:

real 32m25.393s user 19m37.271s sys 12m12.282s

There difference is almost 15 minutes!  Is that normal?  Or am I OK  
in thinking that the wrappers in pkgsrc really slow down things that  
much?  (Not blaming anyone, just trying to see what's the cause.)

Thanks,

-- 
Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv84@gmail.com>