[webkit-dev] Tip: Use 64-bit git binaries on Mac OS X

[Eric Seidel]

Mark Rowe pointed out to me over IRC that the real problem is we're
blowing out the vnode cache.

Even on an 8GB machine, the default cache is too small for all of
WebKit to fit in it.

On my 4GB machine (and on Mark's 8GB) we tried incrementing the cache
to 384000 (the 4GB default is 64512 and the 8GB default is 128000).

My git status times dropped again by over 50% to 2.6 seconds! (still
an eternity compared to a linux machine of course...)

If you'd like to play around with this, you can set your vnode cache limit with:
sudo sysctl -w kern.maxvnodes=384000

You can read it with:
sysctl kern.maxvnodes

You can test to see if the cache is large enough by trying:
git status; time git status

the second one should be very fast if your cache is large enough.

I don't know what the exact right trade-off is.  I believe the vnode
cache uses wired memory (which is a limited resource!).  As far as I
can tell you can't decrease the cache max w/o rebooting.  sysctl will
set it, but setting it to a smaller number seems to have not effect.

I don't know how to make the setting last across reboots.  Mark
mentioned that putting the setting in /etc/sysctl.conf should work,
but that at least for his machine that didn't seem to have any effect
for this particular setting.

That's what I know.

-eric


On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 3:02 PM, Eric Seidel <eric at webkit.org> wrote:
>
> FYI, my git status runs on my Mac Book Pro were an average of 9.2 seconds (git version 1.7.1, git-osx-installer) before installing Mihai's 64bit build (git version 1.7.3.3), and were 6.0 seconds after.
> -eric
>
> On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Eric Seidel <eric at webkit.org> wrote:
>>
>> I've posted a patch to make webkit-patch warn users when they're on a 64-bit system with a 32-bit git:
>> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50715
>> 4 seconds on every git status is huge.  webkit-patch upload has to run at least 3 git status commands (due to expecting files to change on disk during operation), so this means a savings of 12 seconds on your machine!
>> -eric
>> On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 4:04 PM, Mihai Parparita <mihaip at chromium.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> After complaining to a Linux-using friend for the n-th time that "git
>>> status" was much slower on my Snow Leopard machine than on his Linux
>>> box, I decided to look into why this is. As it turns out, most people
>>> get git binaries from http://code.google.com/p/git-osx-installer/,
>>> which are 32-bit. Switching to 64-bit binaries made git status go from
>>> 6.58s to 2.50s (mainly because this does fewer mmaps).
>>>
>>> You can download a 64-bit binary installer from
>>> https://github.com/downloads/mihaip/git_osx_installer/git-1.7.3.3-intel-x86_64-leopard.dmg,
>>> or you can build it yourself (more details at
>>> http://blog.persistent.info/2010/12/making-git-faster-on-large-repositories.html).
>>>
>>> Mihai
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> webkit-dev mailing list
>>> webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org
>>> http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
>>
>