Fedora's tempest in a stack frame

Posted Jan 18, 2023 23:48 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Fedora's tempest in a stack frame by intgr
Parent article: Fedora's tempest in a stack frame

> But I seriously doubt being able to profile Fedora more easily will result in enough optimization patches to improve performance at least 2% across the board *all around the distribution*.

I'm looking forward to finding out who's correct here.

Speaking personally, being able to do system-wide (ie not just single-application) profiling is worth a slight overall performance hit. Because currently it is effectively impossible to do so (at least for anything non-trivial)

Fedora's tempest in a stack frame

Posted Jan 19, 2023 0:15 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (1 responses)

I think this is a misunderstanding. This isn't going to result in generalized performance improvements. It's a general pessimization. But it seems extremely likely to facilitate specific performance fixes that will make a huge difference to users who are suffering from particular performance problems. This should benefit users in practice to a much greater extent than it hurts.

Hopefully. ;)

Like Brendan said, "once you find a 500% perf win you have a different perspective about the <1% cost." Well the cost may be a little higher than 1%, but point remains.

Fedora's tempest in a stack frame

Posted Jan 19, 2023 4:50 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> But it seems extremely likely to facilitate specific performance fixes that will make a huge difference to users who are suffering from particular performance problems.

Thank you. Who cares about a 2% hit on software that runs 0.001% of the time = the vast majority of software. Performance is ALL about bottlenecks and critical sections. Which you can't do anything about if you don't even know where they are.

Fedora's tempest in a stack frame

Posted Jan 20, 2023 7:58 UTC (Fri) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]

As a somewhat technical user, I'll take the 1-5% performance hit if it enables me to debug issues like firefox + gnome-shell randomly deciding to collectively eat 120% CPU while the screen is locked. I've tried sysprof and the profile is gibberish without frame pointers.

Sadly I use Ubuntu, so Fedora's decision won't help me directly. It does make it somewhat more tempting to switch distros.