Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] Scrollkeeper is extremely slow on gnome2-user-docs

[Dan M. <mu...@al...>]

On 11 Jun 2002, Frederic Crozat wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm wondering on the scrollkeeper performance when it is indexing
> gnome2-user-docs files..
> 
> On my PIII/750Mhz, it takes more than 10 minutes to complete..
> 
> This is definitely a stopper for Mandrake cooker installation (this
> locks our install process until scrollkeeper is done).
> 
> It is ok or is there something wrong in our packages ?
> 
> (PS : using scrollkeeper 0.3.9 with docbook-xml-stylesheets 4.1.2
> correctly registered in XML catalog..)

I just took a glance at the gnome2-user-docs to see why it might be slow.  
It looks like it has an OMF file for each of the ~12 chapters, each of
which point to the main document.  So, when it is installed it indexes and
extracts the TOC for the entire document (which is quite large) 12 times.

I suspect the intent was to have each chapter of the User Guide show up in
the TOC individually.  I'm not sure if this can be done without actually 
making each chapter its own document.  Pat - Could you comment, or direct 
me to the right person, as to what the intent was here?

For now it makes sense to remove the OMF files except for 
user-guide-C.omf.  That will at least speed things up a lot and allow you 
to make a sane package.

When we have lots of translations of large documents, we may run into
performance issues once again.  The easy solution is to ship translations
of very large documents seperately.  There may also be ways to optimize
the stylesheets.  

In a future release, I plan to allow the extracted information to be
generated at build time and installed.  This way the user's system doesn't
have to re-generate them unless they upgrade their ScrollKeeper version
(to a version which has additional extracted data, relative to the version
used to build the package).  Users who install from a distribution's CD
would not see a significant change in installation time due to SK.

Dan