Ledger compiles with debug information - thus decreasing speed. about ledger HOT 9 OPEN

Not sure what the issue is here. @n4s-linux can you please clarify? Is that ledger by default compiles with debug by default but shouldn't according to you?

from ledger.

Hi there. Yes, it turns out that with debug information compared to the optimized binary without debug info - it its 8 times faster.
So by compiling ledger without debugging, we are saving a lot of time.
It may not matter to most users, - but if You grow You book to 20k transactions, You will surely notice - it can take up to 800ms. The same book can be run without debugging in only 100ms.

from ledger.

Could be that changing to the debug build flavor by default was done unintentional.

See https://github.com/ledger/ledger/blob/master/acprep#L234-L235, it seems the codelines date back to e0473e2 when John "[r]ewrote acprep in Python and improved the build".

If you build using ./acprep default is the compiled ledger's speed acceptable for you, @n4s-linux?

from ledger.

that builds the slow version for me.
takes 1.138 seconds to run my book (23.4k postings)
whereas the optimized binary will only take 0.174 seconds.

which is ~6.5 times slower than my current binary.

i used acprep opt to get the fast version

from ledger.

After a quick investigation I think the performance improvements are mainly due to acprep setting NO_ASSERTS (which I believe should be DISABLE_ASSERTS as that is the option declared in CMakeLists.txt, which then sets NO_ASSERTS). Generally asserts could be useful in production code, yet the function implementing asserts is called debug_assert (assert is a macro), so its intended use is likely not for production.

from ledger.

To better understand your measurements, @n4s-linux, would you be willing to share how, i.e. with which commands, you measure performance and possible share your anonymised underlying dataset (e.g. ledger print --anon)?

from ledger.

Sure thing.
Not sure if the book balances when it puts all the A's in front of the amount, i surely cant run that book
anon.txt

from ledger.

Thanks, @n4s-linux, and to get a better understanding how you measure performance, which commands do you run?

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Note to self: Unless ledger is compiled with DISABLE_ASSERTS tracing, which may slow down ledger, is still available (see ledger.hh.in:64)

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