Re: Announcing Dolt, a drop-in Libtool replacement which cuts build times in half

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 9 Apr 2008, Ross Burton wrote:

> I realise this isn't libtool 2.2, so I'm willing to believe there are further
> speedups.

What I notice from your timings is that libtool 2.1 takes much less 
system time than libtool 1.5.26-3 but the user time is quite similar. 
The real time is surely most important, and it seems that the real 
time is improved with libtool 2.1 but not very dramatically.

The mystery as to where the time is actually going is why I have 
suggested several times that there should be an effort to test libtool 
under a DTrace-enhanced shell (shell with a DTrace provider) and 
perform an analysis of what is being done and where time is being 
spent using dtrace.  Even without a DTrace-enhanced shell, it is 
possible to see where time is going in a script using DTrace.

A DTrace-enhanced shell is going into OpenSolaris.  See 
"http://blogs.sun.com/tpenta/entry/psarc_2008_008_dtrace_provider";.

Quite often when I profile a program I find that something quite 
unexpected is hogging the time and the fix is quite trivial.  Perhaps 
we will find this with libtool as well.

For those of you who feel offended that I suggest using a tool which 
is only currently available under Solaris and OS-X Leopard, I find it 
to be no more insulting than a suggestion to run software under 
valgrind, which is only available under Linux (and sometimes on 
FreeBSD).

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/