[racket] Package installation VERY SLOW

From: George Neuner (gneuner2 at comcast.net)
Date: Mon Aug 25 21:42:08 EDT 2014

Hi all,

I'm running Racket under 64-bit Win7 Home on an i7 with 12GB of RAM.

Just upgraded to 6.0.1 from 5.3.4.  I know it's a big leap and 6.1 is
out already, but I tried 6.1 and quickly experienced several of those
non-reproducible crashes I've been reading about in the lists.

6.0.1 is behaving itself, but installing new packages from PLaneT or
migrating packages from the older version is taking HOURS ...
virtually all of it spent processing .scrbl files.

I have both 32 and 64 bit versions: doesn't matter which version I
use, how much memory I give to Racket (in racket-prefs.rktd), or
whether I use raco from the command line or the GUI-based package
manager.

Example: trying to install *just* Neil's CSV:2:0 took nearly an hour
(yes, it has several dependencies).  With 64-bit Racket configured for
3GB, memory use spiked over 1.9GB according to Process Explorer.  And
that was the *fastest* installation ... reducing the memory limit
below 2GB just slows it down.
[I didn't try running the 32-bit version with more than 1.5GB, but it
behaved the same way ... reducing the memory limit just slowed it
down.]

For giggles I tried migrating CSV:1:7 (which has a single dependency
not shared with 2:0) from 5.3.4.  That still took almost 16 minutes,
and again nearly all of it processing some .scrbl file.  For more
giggles, I nuked the PLaneT cache so as to start over: same 16 minutes
for fresh install of 1:7.

For comparison, 5.3.4 installs CSV:1:7 fresh in under 3 minutes.



???  Is anyone else running 6.x on Windows?  I can't figure out what,
if anything, I'm doing wrong.

Subjectively, 6.0.1 feels sluggish compared to 5.3.4 (with same memory
limits), but I haven't gotten to the point where I can objectively
test much because a lot of my programs depend on external packages.
Based on the few I have tried to install/migrate so far, Halloween may
be past before I am able to do any real work with 6.0.1.

George


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