Re: Lilypond Speed

[Michael David Crawford]

Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
> > While LilyPond may be single threaded, in general the underlying operating
> > system is multithreaded.  It might be the case that a system call LilyPond
> > depends on can get executed in a multithreaded way.
>
> LilyPond almost does not interact with the OS except for reading and
> writing a couple of files. It's CPU bound.

That may be true, but it also places a load on the system in ways that 
aren't obvious.  For example the virtual memory system, paging in 
executable code, mapping shared libraries.

It was mentioned that LilyPond uses a lot of stack.  The stack is 
extended automatically on most VM systems - when you try to access a 
region of stack memory that's not mapped, there is a page fault, and the 
page fault handler creates the necessary mapping.

It would be interesting to see what the performance is on different 
operating systems, but running on the exact same hardware.

--
Michael David Crawford
address@hidden
http://www.geometricvisions.com/ <-- Creative Commons LilyPond Scores