Performance optimization in av::fixup - use buffered IO, not mapped file

[Christopher Faylor]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 07:13:04PM -0800, Daniel Colascione wrote:
>On 12/11/2012 5:06 PM, Daniel Colascione wrote:
>> On 12/10/2012 7:51 PM, Daniel Colascione wrote:
>>> The key to generating a binary that repros the problem is to unexec emacs, then
>>> try to repro with that generated binary, not a copy of it.
>> 
>> The real explanation is a lot simpler: the binary is sparse. When you create a
>> file mapping object for a sparse file, Windows discards all cached pages for
>> that file. It makes sense that compilers (and Emacs unexec) would create sparse
>> files as they seek around inside their outputs.
>
>Anyway, the binary is sparse because our linker produces sparse files.
>
>Would the Cygwin developers accept this patch? With it, applications would need
>to explicitly use ftruncate to make files sparse. Considering the horrible and
>unexpected performance implications of sparse files, I don't think generating
>them automatically from a sequence of seeks and writes is the right thing to do.

I don't know if this was already done (don't see it in a quick glance at
the archives) but, if this is just a simple case of executable files
being sparse, it seems like an obvious optimization would be to just to
do a, e.g.,

cp --sparse=never -p foo.exe foo.exe.tmp
mv foo.exe.tmp foo.exe

Wouldn't that remove the sparseness and wouldn't you see astounding
performance improvments as a result?

I don't think we should be considering ripping code out of Cygwin
without some actual data to back up claims.  Testing something like the
above should make it easier to justify.

I'm actually rather surprised that setup.exe's tar code would maintain an
executable's sparseness.

cgf