Re: speed of Net::LDAP

[Graham B. <gb...@po...>]

On Thu, Jul 27, 2000 at 10:44:38AM +0100, John Berthels wrote:
> 
> > For what it is worth, I don't find Net::LDAP to be unusably slow - the 
> > nice API and the portability make up for a lot.
> 
> Ditto. I find that the startup time kills perceived performance for
> one-shot scripts, but once running it is fine. Whether or not this is a
> problem depends, of course, on your intended application.

Hopefully one day we might get good byte code in perl and that might
help a lot. This may be a thing for perl6 though.

> I posted some numbers on this some time ago which hinted that Net::LDAP
> was significantly slower than other perl modules to start up - but the
> problem is to find 'comparable' modules. It is slower than Net::SMTP - but
> that is a lot simpler. It is slower than Tk - but Graham pointed out that
> that defers loading of code until it is used, i.e. you take the hit later
> in the script.

It might be good to have a page on the web-site about performance as it
seems an FAQ (almost) but the answer is too long to go into an FAQ document IMO.

> Would there be any value in deferring some Net::LDAP module loading until
> it was needed or are we already as lean as we could get in that area?
> (sorry - being lazy and not checking).

Net::LDAP already does this to some extent. But I think one of the big
startup costs is that Convert::ASN1 must parse the ASN.1 for the protocol.

gbarr@chipper:~/src/ldap > time perl -Ilib -e0
perl -Ilib -e0  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 0.000 total

gbarr@chipper:~/src/ldap > time perl -Ilib -MNet::LDAP -e0
perl -Ilib -MNet::LDAP -e0  0.38s user 0.00s system 64% cpu 0.593 total

gbarr@chipper:~/src/ldap > time perl -Ilib -MNet::LDAP::ASN -e0
perl -Ilib -MNet::LDAP::ASN -e0  0.25s user 0.00s system 32% cpu 0.763 total

As you can see it is a large % of the load time.

It should be possible to just parse this on install and dump it to a file.

Graham.