From: Tomas Pospisek's Mailing Lists <tpo2@...>
Date: 2008-01-10T06:10:31+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] JRuby 1.1 RC 1 Released

On Thu, 10 Jan 2008, Lionel Bouton wrote:

> Tomas Pospisek's Mailing Lists wrote:
>
>>> If the packager doesn't pay attention to the compile options, it can be.
>>>
>>
>> Erm.
>
> Oups ?
>
> I only said "can" which only refers to a possibility as:
> - I didn't use Ruby on Debian/Ubuntu much (yet),
> - but I just read a 2x perf increase report after recompilation and 
> remembered other such reports last year on this list.
> Can you comment on the tradeoffs these reports might have made unknowingly?
>
>> You don't want to say Debian should use "-threads" and thus not allow its 
>> users to use the Tk library which requires "-threads"?
>
> "USE=-threads" in my post refered to an option disabling pthread support in 
> one of my Gentoo setups which has not much to do with the more common perf 
> increases reported (most of them on Debian/Ubuntu).
>
> BTW, technically Tk can be supported wihtout pthread if Tk isn't compiled 
> with it itself... IIRC the problem is the same with most libs Ruby interfaces 
> with: if it's compiled with pthread, Ruby must too.
>
> In a binary distro, you have to make choices though and it's perfectly 
> understandable that disabling pthread nearly everywhere in Debian just to 
> solve the performance problems of a very small minority is not OK.
>
> Unless all the reports of increased performance on Debian/Ubuntu are based on 
> unknowingly disabling pthread (ldd /usr/bin/ruby anyone?) this subject isn't 
> really interesting though.

There was a thread a while ago about performance numbers here and the two 
variables influencing it were, AFAICS, "-threads" and ruby version number (i.e. 
1.9 being much faster).
*t

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   Tomas Pospisek
   http://sourcepole.com -  Linux & Open Source Solutions
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