[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #59711] 30 seconds to load the "ltfat" package

[Markus Mützel]

Follow-up Comment #9, bug #59711 (project octave):

Thanks.
So, even if the current stable is much faster than Octave 6.1, it is still
about 6 times slower than Octave 5.2.

I attached a profiler (Very Sleepy CS) to Octave and ran `pkg load ltfat` on
my machine. The profiler slows down execution notably. But I hope the results
are still valid.

For me, it is still `canonicalize_file_name` that consumes most of the time in
the running thread.
The "slowest" call stacks point to this code:
https://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/annotate/262cdfc6faf9/libinterp/corefcn/load-path.cc#l1938

According to the commit message, this was added to solve bug #57439.
I wonder if we could use a combination of `make_absolute` and `tolower`
instead of `canonicalize_file_name` in that function on Windows
(`canonicalize_file_name` is probably much faster on Linux because it is a
system call).
This might also be a potential candidate for a `normalize_file_name` function
that was discussed in bug #59706.

The second choking point is in `octave::load_path::dir_info::update` where
`file_stat` is used to check whether directories exist. There are much more
efficient ways to check for this on Windows.
See: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?57439#comment50


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