[plt-dev] documentation slowing down installs and builds dramatically

I haven't investigated, but I have a guess. When a planet package A
depends on another planet package B, then trying to compile A triggers
an install of B. As the docs for B build, the search and master index
are re-built, and that's where the time goes. Then the build of A
continues, and again the search and master index are rebuilt. If you
end up installing N packages, then the search and master index are
built N times, which would take a while if N is big enough.

Maybe someone who knows planet better can say that it doesn't work that
way? Or maybe someone has observed enough about the build to say that
the time isn't spent just in re-building the index and search?

At Sun, 31 May 2009 00:14:59 -0400, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> I have a fresh anecdote of practical impact of the slow documentation 
> crunching.
> 
> The first bit of code I try to run from the Snooze tutorial takes over 9 
> minutes on a fast computer, before it attempts to connect to the database.
> 
> It installs a lot of small PLaneT packages in these 9+ minutes, and 
> seems to spend most of that time crunching documentation.
> 
> (That's with reasonably fast Internet, PLTCOLLECTS unset, DrScheme 
> memory limit off, lots of RAM, and no swap space in use, otherwise idle 
> 2GHz dual-core, on Linux.)
> 
> -- 
> http://www.neilvandyke.org/
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