Re: [fetchmail-devel] 24h comparison of old and new UID handling code

[Rainer W. <rwe...@ms...>]

"Matthias Andree" <mat...@gm...> writes:
> Am 28.05.2010, 02:34 Uhr, schrieb Rainer Weikusat:
>
>> The numbers contained in this mail come from two 24h 'observations' of
>> the old and new UID handling code done via oprofile. They are based on
>> querying 119 POP3 accounts. Some statistics about the .fetchids files
>> (everything in lines):
>>
>> 	total:		35004
>>         max:		8019
>>         min:		1
>>        average:	294.15
>>         median:		46
>>         std. dev:	823.87
>
> D'oh. A std dev' that's thrice the average. There's a considerable
> chance  for a negative number. :-}

It is conceivable that I am miscalculating the number. But this really
just communicates that the distribution is very asymmetric. 

>> UID handling is still the dominant operation (processor-time wise)
>> performed by fetchmail.
>
> No it's not, see below -- you're not grouping other code properly. If
> oprofile samples call stacks so that it can cumulate per caller (like
> du(1) does) you'll see it's not. Otherwise, we'll resort to the
> preclusion  reasoning below.

This seems to be a disagreement about the meaning of the term
'dominant'. It may well have some defined meaning I am not aware of.
I am not a repurposed physicist or person with any other kind of
degree , just a programmer and even this just because I spent
something like twenty years learning about this stuff whatever I could
gather from sources available to me.

[...]

>> I hope to be able to produce something like a final patch at some time
>> late evening tomorrow.
>
> No urge here, I'm not sure if I'll have the time to merge that stuff
> over  the week-end. May well turn mid to end of next week before I get
> to it.

I will nevertheless do that since it is a fairly simple operation,
which I can put into a few idle minutes in my (presently) usual 10h+
workdays and something I can absolutely not do is put much more effort
into this, except maybe two o'clock in the morning after working for
ten hours. Since the code exists, works and (as far as I could
determine) mitigates the problem it was supposed to mitigate, any
justification I could conceivable use to explain to my boss why I am
even looking at this during the time I am neither eating nor sleeping
is gone :-(.