Re: Serious performance problems (Gerrit/Danny please comment)
From: Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please at cygwin dot com>
To: cygwin at cygwin dot com
Date: Sat, 28 May 2005 14:57:20 -0400
Subject: Re: Serious performance problems (Gerrit/Danny please comment)
References: <http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2005-05/msg01305.html>
<http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2005-05/msg01319.html>
Reply-to: cygwin at cygwin dot com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Sat, May 28, 2005 at 01:24:31PM +0200, Vaclav Haisman wrote:
Somebody mentioned that malloc implementation could be the problem. Dunno. I
has also crossed my mind that another difference between FreeBSD and Cygwin
is
implementation of C++ exceptions. Maybe the SJLJ implementation that Cygwin
AFAIK uses has too big overhead.
To test this theory, I just tried replacing Cygwin's "Unwind" functions
with those from mingw and saw a noticeable speed up in the execution of
this program. I did this by extracting the contents of mingw's libgcc
to a directory and then including unwind-c.o and unwind-sjlj.o on the
command line when linking the test case. I had to modify the test case
by adding these two lines to the bottom:
int __mingwthr_key_dtor;
int _CRT_MT;
to avoid undefined symbol errors so this is obviously not intended as a
complete solution.
On doing this, the program went from taking 25 seconds to execute to
taking 7 seconds to execute. That's still 4x slower than mingw but it
is, nonetheless, a noticeable difference.
Gerrit and Danny do you know what the difference between the mingw and
cygwin implementations of these functions might be?
I too suspect sjlj exceptions to be the problem. This has already been
reported on GCC lists: http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14563
The sjlj overhead affects both cygwun and mingw, but cygwin has the
additional overhead of posix threads to ensure thread-safe allocation
and destruction of structures used by exception handling, while mingw
uses win32api directly
(In CRT_MT == 0 case, it doesn't even bother cleaning up)