Debian bug report logs - #1670
start-stop-daemon is too slow

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From cus.cam.ac.uk!iwj10 Fri Oct 13 12:46:35 1995
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From: Ian Jackson <iwj10@cus.cam.ac.uk>
To: debian-bugs@pixar.com
Subject: Re: Bug#1670: start-stop-daemon is too slow

Marek Michalkiewicz writes ("Bug#1670: start-stop-daemon is too slow"):
> Package: dpkg
> Version: 1.0.0-0
> 
> Since start-stop-daemon is run many times during system startup, I think
> it is important to make it faster and less memory-hungry (it causes quite
> a lot of swapping on my home box with 4MB RAM).  It would be very nice to
> have a C version of start-stop-daemon.  I understand, we don't have much
> time left right now, but maybe at least for Release 7...
> 
> Yeah, I know, Perl is great, but compiled C is small and fast!

The speed advantage is why I converted dpkg proper from Perl to C.

However, C is much slower to write than Perl (or other interpreted
scripting languages).

If I was going to rewrite any of the dpkg scripts it would be
update-rc.d, which is really unacceptably slow at the moment.

I shall put this item on the wishlist, but don't expect any movement
this century.

On the other hand, if you were volunteering to write good, clean C
code with all the system calls error-checked and which passes the GCC
flags I'm using for dpkg (-Wall -Wno-implicit -Wwrite-strings
-Wpointer-arith -Wimplicit -Wnested-externs -Wmissing-prototypes
-Wstrict-prototypes) then I'd be happy to include it.

I would say, though, that if you have that much time on your hands I'd
rather you spent it writing a manpage for dpkg.

Ian.

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From i17linuxb.ists.pwr.wroc.pl!marekm Fri Oct 13 08:01:13 1995
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From: Marek Michalkiewicz <marekm@i17linuxb.ists.pwr.wroc.pl>
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Subject: start-stop-daemon is too slow
To: debian-bugs@pixar.com
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 1995 16:01:00 +0100 (MET)
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Package: dpkg
Version: 1.0.0-0

Since start-stop-daemon is run many times during system startup, I think
it is important to make it faster and less memory-hungry (it causes quite
a lot of swapping on my home box with 4MB RAM).  It would be very nice to
have a C version of start-stop-daemon.  I understand, we don't have much
time left right now, but maybe at least for Release 7...

Yeah, I know, Perl is great, but compiled C is small and fast!

Marek