----- Original Message -----
From: Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@at.or.at To: Jonathan Wilkes jancsika@yahoo.com Cc: "pd-list@iem.at" pd-list@iem.at Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2013 5:06 PM Subject: Re: [PD] search plugin time optimisation
[...]
- Note that my measurements are just for read times. Xapian will be
writing to an index so
you'll have to factor in write times for _each_ string of file
contents. Those probably aren't
insignificant digits.
The Debian package could generate the cache right after installation. Mac and Windows would have to happen on first launch. The benefits of this would be real, but it would also take a real amount of work to implement ;)
For the record I have zero interest in investigating how to integrate Xapian into Pd-extended, making sure the tcl bindings actually work and aren't just abandonware, making sure it actually works with comparable results on each OS (as opposed to, say, opening and closing files with tcl), and integrating Xapian into the Pd-extended build process for OSX and Windows. Those caveats aside I'd be happy to revise the search plugin to use the Xapian API.
-Jonathan
.hc
.hc
On 01/17/2013 03:35 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
Another update on this: If I pair down the number of files to something that approaches
Pd-extended's
extra folder + doc folder (around 6,500 items): Results for GNU/Linux:
Getting dirs takes 524 microseconds per iteration Getting files takes 324646 microseconds per iteration Reading files takes 5483581 microseconds per iteration Done.
This is on the Debian Wheezy machine with the 1gig ram and fast processor-- it might take slightly longer on the other machine but there's probably not much difference.
Unfortunately WinXP still takes an eternity to do the same-- I
didn't
copy the results but getting files was something like 8 seconds,
and
reading them was about 30 seconds. (And that wasn't including
the
"doc" folder so about 700 fewer files!)
Unfortunately this discrepancy is so large that I can think of few
decent
changes to the plugin and its interface that would improve the
situation
for Windows users without bothering unix-derived OS users. Five seconds on Debian for the first search (and less than a second for subsequent ones) is completely reasonable IMO, and I don't see
the
Pd-extended documentation growing significantly any time soon.
So to end a _long_ answer to your question, I think you have to
remove
the old libs from your search path and simply put up with the
minimum
35 second initial search time. If subsequent searches for
anything other
than empy symbol (i.e., "") are taking 2 minutes to
complete let
me know
and I'll try to troubleshoot it.
-Jonathan
----- Original Message -----
From: Jonathan Wilkes jancsika@yahoo.com To: João Pais jmmmpais@googlemail.com; PD-List
Cc: Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2013 3:21 AM Subject: Re: [PD] search plugin time optimisation
If you're describing the time it takes for an _initial_
search, see
below.
However, subsequent file access is an order of magnitude faster-- on my
pd-extended
install with ca. 5,000 docs I barely even see the progressbar at all
after the
first
search.
I tested the attached tcl script in a folder that had 307
subdirs and
about
200megs of files; roughly 18,000 files, 13,000 of which were
docs
readable by
the script.
Debian Wheezy amd_64 AMD Athlon(tm) II P360 Dual-Core Processor 4gigs ram Results: Getting dirs takes 184543 microseconds per iteration Getting files takes 1387819 microseconds per iteration Reading files takes 14766208 microseconds per iteration Done.
In other words gathering up all the directories into a list takes less than 200 milliseconds, getting a list of all the files takes about a second and a half, and actually opening the file and feeding the contents to a variable takes about 15 seconds.
Debian Wheezy (32bit) Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.60GHz 1gig of ram Results: Getting dirs takes 46418 microseconds per iteration Getting files takes 1365663 microseconds per iteration Reading files takes 18203551 microseconds per iteration Done.
Similar results on a machine with less ram and 32bit.
WinXP Intel Core2 6600 @ 2.4GHz 1gig of ram (NTFS filesystem) Results: Getting dirs takes 0 microseconds per iteration Getting files takes 13109000 microseconds per iteration Reading files takes 41250000 microseconds per iteration Done.
Not sure why it doesn't register anything for getting
dirs. Also,
no idea why Windows takes so much longer to return the list of files. I haven't found any clues on the tcl wiki,
tcl
docs,
or tcl irc. Finally, notice how much longer Windows takes to read the files: it's nearly 3x slower than the Debian 64
machine.
Mac OS X 10.7.5 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2gig of ram Results: Getting dirs takes 5158 microseconds per iteration Getting files takes 979583 microseconds per iteration Reading files takes 30045212 microseconds per iteration Done.
Still much faster than Windows for a comparable CPU, but reading still takes some time
***
So while I can make some optimizations here and there in the search plugin, the measurements above are best case scenarios. You can try the script on Windows 7 if you want-- unfortunately the script only looks inside
directories in
it's own parent directory so you might have to make a test folder with lots of docs in order to make use of it.
However, I
suspect you'll see number more like my WinXP report above, and that would mean you simply cannot get an initial search
below
one minute with a comparable amount of docs.
Alternatives are: * build an index from [pd META] data. I did this with the
original
search tool built in pd, but you lose the ability to do a full
text
search
and effectively can no longer search text files and html. * build a full text index from the docs. Faster probably but
it would
be a large file. * use a search engine library like Xapian. But it requires
someone
who wants to do the work of using a searching engine library
like
Xapian.
All those alternatives still have the requirement that you
spend time building the index at least once, instead of each
time you
restart
your computer or flush/overwrite wherever your OS caches the dirs/files for the current search plugin. And even with
Xapian
you're
opening files in tcl and sending them to an index through the
Xapain
interface,
so you'd still see the long wait time building the initial
index.
I'll try to test a Pd-extended nightly to see how the
smaller
number
of docs performs later.
-Jonathan
----- Original Message -----
From: João Pais jmmmpais@googlemail.com To: PD-List pd-list@iem.at Cc: Sent: Wednesday, January 9, 2013 7:05 AM Subject: [PD] search plugin time optimisation
Hi,
I was trying the search plugin, and one search takes
around 60s.
In the
end, the
plugin reports that he had to look through "16337
docs".
I have several work directories in my path, which I
don't use
that
often. Is
there a way of optimising the search plugin?
The system is W7.
Best,
João
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