As Gnome-VFS has switched to D-Bus - and some modules (like SMB) use D-Bus to transport file-data i would like to raise the question if D-Bus is a good choice for this purpose...
Here is a comparison of D-Bus with a simple IPC message protocol (vio_trans*)), sending 1 GB of data with one-way messages (4096 byte data chunks) over sockets (from client to server)... D-Bus: client: 16.60user 2.10system 1:16.05elapsed 24%CPU server: 49.39user 2.93system 1:18.58elapsed 66%CPU vio_trans: client: 0.38user 2.08system 0:06.70elapsed 36%CPU server: 0.52user 2.01system 0:09.76elapsed 26%CPU --> D-Bus is more than 10 times slower. Of course D-Bus performance for byte-arrays could be improved, but the protocol overhead will remain. I guess D-Bus is just not optimal for this particular purpose... How I tested: client test: $ dd if=/dev/zero bs=1000000000 count=1 | time vio_trans_streamtest client /tmp/testsock server test: $ time vio_trans_streamtest server /tmp/testsock | wc -c A simple IPC protocol specially designed for VFS file-operations could be pretty fast. Perhaps all protocol-handlers could run inside the VFS daemon and the clients connect via a socket. It's easier to provide an async client interface this way - you don't need threads in the client... Also, the VFS client library can be pretty lightweight, perhaps event without a glib dependency and therefore be more attractive to be used by everyone (even KIO?). Another advantage of moving protocol handling to a daemon is that buggy protocol handlers cannot crash the client application... In the VFS-daemon there would be one thread per client connection. Because protocol-handlers (modules) are synchronous, the client has to open multiple connections for concurrent file-operations... *) The vio_trans library and the tests can be downloaded from here: http://www.scheinwelt.at/~norbertf/dadapt/files/vio_trans/ regards, Norbert _______________________________________________ gnome-vfs-list mailing list gnome-vfs-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-vfs-list
