Re: GCL slow reading files

On 4/10/26 12:27 AM, David Scherfgen wrote:

> Raymond Toy <[email protected]> schrieb am Fr., 10. Apr. 2026, 00:27:
>
>     On 4/9/26 8:33 AM, Leo Butler wrote:
>
>>     To see what I mean, start a fresh maxima+gcl build and do:
>>
>>     showtime:true $
>>     load(draw);
>
>     On my fairly fast machine, ecl takes about 3.3 sec. gcl takes 65
>     sec; ccl64, 0.57 sec; cmucl, 2.2 sec. Ccl is known for having a
>     very, very fast compiler.
>
> On my machine, GCL takes 2.4 seconds to load "draw". But it uses an 
> older version of GCL, namely 2.6.14. Maybe the "slowness" was 
> introduced with 2.7.x.
>
> I could confirm that GCL 2.6.14 too is quite slow in reading files. 
> Reading a 50 MB file took more than 4 seconds on a lightning fast NVMe 
> SSD with ZFS and a huge cache on top.

Wow, it’s much worse with 2.7.2:

|(with-open-file (s "doc/info/maxima.info-1" :direction :input 
:element-type '(unsigned-byte 8)) (let* ((len (file-length s)) (buf 
(make-array len :element-type '(unsigned-byte 8)))) (time (read-sequence 
buf s)))) real time : 23.040 secs run-gbc time : 19.840 secs child run 
time : 0.000 secs gbc time : 0.500 secs allocation : 1357 Mbytes 1005136 |

maxima.info-1 is just a million bytes. Does that mean gcl spent 19.8 out 
of 23 sec doing GC? But even 4 sec seems really, really slow. (I’m using 
an external SSD for this. But cmucl does the same test in less than a 
millisecond or so.)

&#8203;

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