On Monday, February 21, 2011, Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 2:24 AM, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: >> On 21 February 2011 06:20, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> There are many (important) potential users who do not use Sage at all >>> just because the startup time is so bad. It's really unfortunate >>> how much I let the startup time of Sage slip over the years. Sorry. >> >>> William Stein >> >> I feel very sorry for anyone that would not use a useful bit of >> software because it takes a few seconds longer to start than they >> would expect for software. >> >> If I want to do a few quick calculations, the command I run is: >> >> $ bc -l >> >> as the 'bc' calculator starts almost instantly - quicker even than >> Mathematica. > > But if sage started up as quick as bc, would you be using the (much > less featured) bc? I have resorted to using "sage -ipython" when I > don't need Sage, which never used to be the case when it was fast. > >> Perhaps "startup time" should be added to >> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_computer_algebra_systems >> >> though perhaps Wikipedia would consider that "original research". >> >> Of course it would be nice for Sage not to take too long to start, but >> one would have to be pretty sad to reject a piece of software on the >> basis of how long it takes to start. > > Unfortunate but true. The point of the test is that we shouldn't even > be close to 1.5 or 2 seconds.
Also, it's 1.5 seconds to start sage from cached files on sage.math. On some machines starting sage without the files being cached can tske over a minute due to tens of thousands of file operations. This is a very real problem. > Now that the lazy import improvements > are finally in (that took a whole year) we should be able to more > aggressively attack this, e.g. > http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/8254 > > - Robert > > -- > To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to > sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel > URL: http://www.sagemath.org > -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
