[racket] Package installation VERY SLOW

Hi Matthew,


On Sat, 30 Aug 2014 07:41:02 -0600, Matthew Flatt
<mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:

>At Mon, 25 Aug 2014 21:42:08 -0400, George Neuner wrote:
>> 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.
>
>Do you mean Evgeny's report on August 1, or did you have something else
>in mind? (I don't have the sense that there are widespread reports of
>problems with v6.1, so I may be missing something.)

I don't recall Evgeny's report offhand and I can't find it just now. I
have seen a different reports of issues with 6.1 in different places.

On Windows 7 I experienced hanging with 64-bit 6.1 - completely
unresponsive, 0% CPU.  This happened numerous times doing different
things: running package manager, editing, even just adjusting
preferences.  It seemed to be a GUI issue as raco worked from the
command line.  I had so much trouble with it that I didn't try very
much.  I uninstalled/reinstalled with fresh downloads a couple of
times before giving up.

32-bit 6.1 did not hang, but it took almost 40 minutes to install
[more than twice as long as 64-bit] and was so slow doing anything
that I was convinced it was broken.  Again I tried
uninstalling/reinstalling without anything changing significantly.

Then I read about the internal changes and decided to fall back to
6.0.1 until everything shakes out.


>If you have time to help and you can quickly provoke crashes --- even
>if you're not sure what causes it --- that sounds promising for
>debugging. I'll ask more about that off-list.

I got your note.  I'd like to help but right now I'm in the middle of
something and don't have a lot of time to muck around with it.

I do have VS2010 available, but Racket was hanging rather than
crashing, so the debugger didn't activate.  Unfortunately I didn't
think to attach to the hung process and see what was happening before
killing it.


>> 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.
>
>It's probably no surprise to hear that it worked ok on my machine
>(about 1 minute) in a fresh v6.0.1 install.
>
>Can you say more about the ".scrbl" part? Is the process of installing
>a Planet package rebuilding documentation for the entire installation?
>Or is it getting stuck on just the documentation for the installed
>packages plus the main page and search index?

It's hard to tell exactly because I'm not very familiar with the
package install process, but it does get stuck "--- building
documentation ---" for long periods with no output from raco.

It seems to spend an inordinate amount of time "processing" scrbl
files that are included with the packages.  I don't mean rendering
them - raco shows that separately - but just "processing" them. 

It would be nice if raco could timestamp its output.

I can try to capture a procmon trace of a simple install if that would
be any help.  Ususally I find traces have too much information 8-(

George