DBus-Daemon Optimizations

Havoc Pennington havoc.pennington at gmail.com
Fri Feb 27 14:19:49 PST 2009


Hi,

I haven't looked at it in years but here is what I found years ago:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/dbus/2004-November/001779.html

I don't know if I've seen much analysis of dbus performance since
then. One might assume that dbus is not showing up as the bottleneck
in very many real-world situations, but maybe people are just quiet
about it.

*after* those 2004 profiling numbers, dbus was changed to support a
fully general recursive type system, which slowed it down a bit again.

The quick tips are:
 * be sure you don't have assertions or debug logging turned on
 * try disabling message validation if your dbus doesn't deal with
untrusted data
   (DBUS_VALIDATION_MODE_WE_TRUST_THIS_DATA_ABSOLUTELY, must be
   changed in the source where DBUS_VALIDATION_MODE_DATA_IS_UNTRUSTED
   is currently hardcoded)
 * if you aren't using threads you might be able to hack out the thread locking

Otherwise afaik it's just that there's a fair bit more code running
than would be running if you were using raw sockets. It is not highly
optimized for speed.

Havoc


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