On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 12:46:15PM -0600, Dan McGee wrote:
This series of patches makes finding a package in our linked list implementation a whole lot faster, if that search is using the standard _alpm_pkg_find, which nearly all are (after the first patch).
It does this by adding a hash function to util.c which is nothing too complicated and named after a publicly available algorithm. When packages are created, we fill in this hash value as soon as the pkgname is read. Finally, the _alpm_pkg_find function is rewritten to take advantage of this field, avoiding repeated strcmp() calls and only falling back to that if a hash is not available and to verify the hash value was not some sort of collision.
Performance figures and numbers are available in the last patch. This actually speeds up operations by nearly 33%, so this is not a total waste of time to consider. :) Review and questions/comments/concerns welcome!
-Dan
Well, nothing's broken so far. Installed a few new packages with -U and ran an -Syu with no trouble. Speed improvement is there, but nothing significant on my smallish database of 500 packages. These patches are boring -- they just work. I thought you had to be brave to use pacman-git. Stop boring me, Dan. (very nice work though) dave