Brock Pytlik wrote:
> Bart Smaalders wrote:
>> Michal Pryc wrote:
>>   
>>> Hi,
>>> I have already asked about this few months back:
>>> http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/pkg-discuss/2008-March/002217.html
>>>
>>> There is an script which shows how the description are taken from the 
>>> manifest file. To get GUI up and running we need to have descriptions 
>>> for *all* packages, so currently this is quite long task, more then that 
>>> this is even longer if the manifests are not in the local catalog.
>>>
>>> The acceptable time for such option would be less then 1 seconds which 
>>> is far from what is now. Currently each time user starts GUI the number 
>>> of opened manifest files is the number of all packages, just to get 
>>> description, that is why I think (I might be wrong) that caching this 
>>> kind of information will give huge performance improvement.
>>>
>>> If you have any other suggestions I would be very happy to go other then 
>>> caching way.
>>>
>>> The bug 243 should cover this as Danek wrote in that thread:
>>> http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=243
>>>
>>> I am attaching dtrace script which shows opened  and written files (O/W) 
>>>  running this script together with the script attached in the e-mail 
>>> from March would give information how much files needs to be opened and 
>>> how slow is getting description information.
>>>
>>> ./print_changes.d /path/to/the/ips/catalog
>>>     
>>
>> Rather than caching, etc, I'd like to suggest that using the search
>> mechanism to retrieve information is a better  approach.
>>
>> This would allow for the quick retrieval of descriptions, icons, etc,
>> from current or new repos.
>>
>> - Bart
>>
>>   
> I'm not sure how you're envisioning using the search mechanism to do 
> this. To my knowledge, search doesn't currently support getting the 
> description (for example) of a specific package. This wasn't a use case 
> for search which I had thought of so I'll have to consider whether the 
> new version of search would have the capacity to do this (at least if it 
> provides (or could provide) the data structures to make this efficient)
> 
> Also, setting aside whether or not search could do this, isn't the cost 
> of transferring all of this information from a remote server on start up 
> each time prohibitive? Especially for things like icons, isn't that a 
> large amount of data to pull across the network given the time frame (< 
> 1 sec) we're considering?
> 
> If I understand correctly, there are really two problems: pulling 
> information for all the local individual manifest files takes too long; 
> pulling the information for manifests not stored locally takes way too long.
> 
> On the first, I suppose there's no reason (other than duplication of 
> data) not to gather this information and pkg install time and add it to 
> a central location. On the second, given that hitting the server seems 
> unavoidable to me (which means the 1sec constraint is likely to be 
> violated), perhaps what should be done is the program caches a small 
> subset of what it will need to retrieve from the server (which would 
> probably be gui dependent since different gui's might prioritize 
> different packages) then it can show the user the cached information 
> while it goes off and asks the server for updated information on those 
> packages and fills in the rest of its package descriptions.
> 


A small local cache is fine as a gui hack, but I'd much rather work towards
a model of retrieving descriptions and icon pointers dynamically.  The icons
can be cached locally by hash.

- Bart


-- 
Bart Smaalders                  Solaris Kernel Performance
[EMAIL PROTECTED]               http://blogs.sun.com/barts
"You will contribute more with mercurial than with thunderbird."
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