Re: [htdig-dev] Improving speed of htdig on mac os x

[Geoffrey H. <ge...@ge...>]

On Jul 26, 2005, at 9:59 AM, Gustave T. Stresen-Reuter wrote:

> One way to improve the speed of htdig on mac os x is to take  
> advantage of the AltiVec processor. I don't know anything about how  
> to do this, but in reading some documentation I ran across a  
> document says that "Existing C code written for serial execution"  
> can take advantage of the AltiVec processor.

I'm not sure there's really a lot that can happen here. Neal can  
contradict me, but the last time I did benchmarking/profiling on the  
code, most of the slowdown during indexing was in the database code,  
and a large part of that was I/O bound.

Furthermore, AltiVec really shines doing floating-point processing,  
e.g. matrix multiplication. There's very, very little of that in ht:// 
Dig.

I think for future development (i.e., 4.0) multi-threading the  
indexing would probably help *MUCH* more than adding AltiVec or SSE  
processor-specific optimizations which mostly help with floating- 
point ops.

And of course, moving to a different database backend would probably  
help immensely too.

Cheers,
-Geoff