From: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>
To: groff@gnu.org, linux-man <linux-man@vger.kernel.org>
Cc: Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>, Dirk Gouders <dirk@gouders.net>,
Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>, Sam James <sam@gentoo.org>,
Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.co.uk>,
Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Compressed man pages (was: Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1)))
Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2023 14:17:57 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <53b0f991-7187-07ed-b2f8-4b6d8d7ffc3a@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <c6e9eb6a-a2ba-1de1-211f-bc6ccc3f7a9a@gmail.com>
[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 5931 bytes --]
On 4/9/23 14:05, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> [Added back linux-man@, and people that commented on this (sub)topic]
> [Added Sam, I've got a question for you]
>
> Hi Alexis,
>
> Please keep (at least) linux-man@ in the loop.
>
> On 4/9/23 08:44, Alexis wrote:
>>
>> As a related data point, i'd like to mention Gentoo's position on
>> this, i.e. that man pages will continue to be bzip2-compressed by
>> default:
>>
>> "app-text/mandoc bzip2 support"
>> https://bugs.gentoo.org/854267
>>
>> "Remove /usr/share/man from default inclusion list for docompress"
>> https://bugs.gentoo.org/836367
>
> As Ingo said[1] 3 years ago, I don't think in this year it makes any
> sense to compress pages anymore. However, since it's simple for me
> to add support for that, and it can be interesting for testing
> purposes, I added support for installing the Linux man-pages
> compressed with bzip2 using the Makefile[2]. While I was at it, I
> also added support for generating .tar.bz2 release tarballs[3].
>
> With this, I was able to test a bit more than what I did yesterday:
>
>
> $ sudo rm -rf /opt/local/man/
> $ sudo make install-man prefix=/opt/local/man/gz_ -j LINK_PAGES=symlink Z=.gz | wc -l
> 2570
> $ sudo make install-man prefix=/opt/local/man/bz2 -j LINK_PAGES=symlink Z=.bz2 | wc -l
> 2570
> $ sudo make install-man prefix=/opt/local/man/man -j LINK_PAGES=symlink Z= | wc -l
> 2570
> $ du -sh /opt/local/man/*
> 5.4M /opt/local/man/bz2
> 5.5M /opt/local/man/gz_
> 9.4M /opt/local/man/man
>
>
> $ export MANPATH=/opt/local/man/gz_/share/man
> $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "man -Kaw RLIMIT_NOFILE | wc -l"
> 37
> 0.31
> $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "find $MANPATH -type f | xargs zgrep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE | wc -l"
> 17
> 1.56
> $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "find $MANPATH -type f | xargs -P0 zgrep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE | wc -l"
> 17
> 1.56
> $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "find $MANPATH -type f | while read f; do zcat \$f | grep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE >/dev/null && echo \$f; done | wc -l"
> 17
> 1.24
> $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "find $MANPATH -type f | while read f; do gzip -d - <\$f | grep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE >/dev/null && echo \$f; done | wc -l"
> 17
> 1.14
>
>
> $ export MANPATH=/opt/local/man/bz2/share/man
> $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "man -Kaw RLIMIT_NOFILE | wc -l"
> 37
> 10.90
> $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "find $MANPATH -type f | xargs bzgrep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE | wc -l"
> 17
> 1.33
> $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "find $MANPATH -type f | xargs -P0 bzgrep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE | wc -l"
> 17
> 1.31
> $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "find $MANPATH -type f | while read f; do bzcat \$f | grep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE >/dev/null && echo \$f; done | wc -l"
> 17
> 1.21
> $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "find $MANPATH -type f | while read f; do bzip2 -d - <\$f | grep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE >/dev/null && echo \$f; done | wc -l"
> 17
> 1.22
>
>
> $ export MANPATH=/opt/local/man/man/share/man
> $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "man -Kaw RLIMIT_NOFILE | wc -l"
> 37
> 0.56
> $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "find $MANPATH -type f | xargs grep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE | wc -l"
> 17
> 0.01
> $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "find $MANPATH -type f | xargs -P0 grep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE | wc -l"
> 17
> 0.01
>
> Weird thing: today, the symlink bug in man(1) was reproducible in
> all kinds of pages, while yesterday it only reproduced in
> uncompressed ones.
>
> Another weird thing: times today changed considerably for the
> find(1) pipelines (half of yesterday's). It's not a thing of
> using dash(1), because I get similar times with bash(1) and its
> builtin time(1).
>
> Important note: Sam, are you sure you want your pages compressed
> with bz2? Have you seen the 10 seconds it takes man-db's man(1) to
> find a word in the pages? I suggest that at least you try to
> reproduce these tests in your machine, and see if it's just me or
> man-db's man(1) is pretty bad at non-gz pages.
>
> Test results:
>
> - man-db's man(1) is slower with plain man(7) source than with .gz
> pages for some misterious reason.
>
> - man-db's man(1) is turtle slow with .bz2 pages.
>
> - xargs -P0 doesn't affect significantly. As Ralph said, this is
> probably because the main issue with find(1) was having the
> bottleneck in clone/fork+exec, and xargs(1) already solves that.
>
> Expanding the pipeline to use zcat(1) instead of zgrep(1)
> improves a little bit more, because the zgrep(1) script is
> probably quite inefficient, while zcat(1) is just a simple
> wrapper around gzip(1). We see that zgrep(1) is more
> inefficient than running ourselves a few programs per file in a
> pipeline!
>
> Calling gzip(1) directly is even faster, since we avoid invoking
> a shell for such a small script.
>
> Expanding the bzgrep(1) pipeline into one using bzcat(1) has
> similar improvements. However, since bzcat(1) is a binary, we
> don't get further improvement from calling bzip2(1) directly.
And I forgot the obvious one:
- Using plain man(7) source is blazingly fast. So much that I
don't miss mdoc(7)'s indexability so much.
However, I must admit that I do miss mdoc(7)'s power sometimes.
The man_lsfunc() and man_lsvar() functions for finding function
prototypes and variable declarations in man(7) source would be
much simpler using mdoc(1), and I could even use mandoc(1) to
find such things.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Alex
>
>>
>>
>> Alexis.
>>
>
>
> [1]: <https://marc.info/?l=mandoc-discuss&m=160668087317110&w=2>
>
> [2]: <https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/?id=6a828d5b6879ef19c3f59034fe1d0850d25d0056>
>
> [3]: <https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/?id=e5b23b9c5b318d69ee78af0906e3bf0c665f9ae5>
>
--
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-04-09 12:18 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 73+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-03-25 20:37 Playground pager lsp(1) Dirk Gouders
2023-03-25 20:47 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-04 23:45 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-05 5:35 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-06 1:10 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-06 8:11 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-06 8:48 ` Gavin Smith
2023-04-07 22:01 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08 7:05 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-08 13:02 ` Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1)) Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08 13:42 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-08 16:06 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08 13:47 ` Colin Watson
2023-04-08 15:42 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08 19:48 ` Accessibility of man pages Dirk Gouders
2023-04-08 20:02 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-08 20:46 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-08 21:53 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-08 22:33 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-09 10:28 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-08 20:31 ` Ingo Schwarze
2023-04-08 20:59 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-08 22:39 ` Ingo Schwarze
2023-04-09 9:50 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-09 10:35 ` Dirk Gouders
[not found] ` <87a5zhwntt.fsf@ada>
2023-04-09 12:05 ` Compressed man pages (was: Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1))) Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-09 12:17 ` Alejandro Colomar [this message]
2023-04-09 18:55 ` G. Branden Robinson
2023-04-09 12:29 ` Colin Watson
2023-04-09 13:36 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-09 13:47 ` Compressed man pages Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-12 8:13 ` Compressed man pages (was: Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1))) Sam James
2023-04-12 8:32 ` Compressed man pages Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-12 10:35 ` Mingye Wang
2023-04-12 10:55 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-12 13:04 ` Compressed man pages (was: Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1))) Kerin Millar
2023-04-12 14:24 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-12 18:52 ` Mingye Wang
2023-04-12 20:23 ` Compressed man pages Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-13 10:09 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-07 2:18 ` Playground pager lsp(1) G. Branden Robinson
2023-04-07 6:36 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-07 11:03 ` Gavin Smith
2023-04-07 14:43 ` man page rendering speed (was: Playground pager lsp(1)) G. Branden Robinson
2023-04-07 15:06 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-07 15:08 ` Larry McVoy
2023-04-07 17:07 ` man page rendering speed Ingo Schwarze
2023-04-07 19:04 ` man page rendering speed (was: Playground pager lsp(1)) Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-07 19:28 ` Gavin Smith
2023-04-07 20:43 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-07 16:08 ` Colin Watson
2023-04-08 11:24 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-07 21:26 ` reformatting man pages at SIGWINCH " Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-07 22:09 ` reformatting man pages at SIGWINCH Dirk Gouders
2023-04-07 22:16 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-10 19:05 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-10 19:57 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-10 20:24 ` G. Branden Robinson
2023-04-11 9:20 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-11 9:39 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-17 6:23 ` G. Branden Robinson
2023-04-08 11:40 ` Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-05 10:02 ` Playground pager lsp(1) Dirk Gouders
2023-04-05 14:19 ` Arsen Arsenović
2023-04-05 18:01 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-05 19:07 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-05 19:56 ` Dirk Gouders
2023-04-05 20:38 ` A less presumptive .info? (was: Re: Playground pager lsp(1)) Arsen Arsenović
2023-04-06 8:14 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-06 8:56 ` Gavin Smith
2023-04-07 13:14 ` Arsen Arsenović
2023-04-06 1:31 ` Playground pager lsp(1) Alejandro Colomar
2023-04-06 6:01 ` Dirk Gouders
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