[Libreoffice] --with-alloc setting

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Neil,

On Thu, 2011-10-06 at 13:45 -0300, Neil Leathers wrote:
> In running through my build settings I was trying to decide which
> value to use for --with-alloc=???.

	Wow - that's a blast from the past. Intel did some work to enable
tcmalloc to be used - one of those micro-optimisations that people hope
will make things faster and often do - but only linearly.

> Currently it defaults to "internal" perhaps this should be changed to
> default to "system". If there is a good reason why "internal" is
> better then it should be documented on the wiki page. Or the trade
> offs and recommendations should be documented on the wiki.

	Right - so, we should do some performance tests of characteristic
documents with the internal vs. system allocator. AFAIR the system
allocator is rather good on Linux, and terrible on Windows ;-) so
possibly we should have a platform-dependent default.

	As for the tcmalloc and abcmalloc options I'd be inclined to strip them
out as cruft we can live without these days.

	Is that reasonable ? I'd just do 3x timing runs for startup / document
load / exit for some reasonably large .doc, .ppt, and .xls [ chosen for
their faster, non-XML impls. by the way ].

	if you use:

	export RTL_LOGFILE=/tmp/startup.nopid

	and remove that before running, you -should- get some nice timestamps
in it that can be used to test.

	It'd be wonderful to have some new research in that area to build
better decisions on.

	Thanks :-)

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot