performace of install-tl (linux)

Johannes Hielscher jhielscher at posteo.de
Sun Apr 3 23:27:50 CEST 2022


Am Sun, 3 Apr 2022 20:27:17 +0200
schrieb Harald Koenig via tex-live <tex-live at tug.org>:

> Hi,
> 
> today I did an install test with Manfred's texcol2022.iso image.
> worked fine.
> 
> BUT again I wondered my on my notebook with SSD running linux took
> exactly 15 min just to install all the package read ISO image from
> SSD and writing to SSD:

On my notebook SSD, the whole installation took 8:48 (that's 14.3 MB/s,
but I had the ISO mounted as a loop device off NFS, so there was an
additional network overhead). I just forgot to thank everyone for the
fastest TL installation that I ever witnessed.

I watched I/O on my SSD, and saw constant write rates of 60..120 MB/s
at a loadavg of slightly above 1. I can only speculate that your SSD
NAND/cache/filesystem(s), CPU, and/or memory are slow, and/or been busy
with other things meanwhile.

Note how this data rate is close to the physical maximum that a DVD can
offer under ideal conditions. I'd say that tlmgr is a perfect match for
the off-the-DVD user experience, but not prematurely optimised :-P

The other main usage scenario of tlmgr (network install from the
internet) is suffering from similar bandwidth constraints (unless you
happen to have a TL mirror in your LAN).

> 
> 	...
> 	Installing [4343/4344, time/total: 14:59/14:59]: zxjatype
> [144k] Installing [4344/4344, time/total: 14:59/14:59]: zztex [147k]
> 	Time used for installing the packages: 15:00
> 
> so I tried to just extract all packages, using the list of
> tlpkg/tlpobj/*.tlpobj files. I'm a bit surprised that I find 4619
> tlpobj files while the installer mentioned 4344 packages.
> 
> just extracting those 4619 packages using tar takes only 3min 15sec
> (3m16.838s real, 142.913 user,   45.949 sys,     95.95 cpu) no matter
> if I just use tar with pipes to uncompress/extract
> 
>    tar xCf ~/tl22 $pkg
> 
> or use temp file as the perl does
> 
>    xz -dcf < $pkg > /tmp/XC ; tar xCf ~/tl22 /tmp/XC
> 
> 
> 
> do you have any idea whats the reason for those extra 12min
> installation time (only extracting pkgs) for the install-tl script ?
> 



Have you tried how things change when you sync(1) between each tarball
extraction? Have you cleared the filesystem cache prior to each
benchmark via `echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches` or similar?
htop? dstat? iotop?




> I'm not a perl guy, I did not even manage to find tar/xz commands in
> any perl file in texlive tree :-(
> 
> 
> happy to run more tests & benchmarks,
> and to test alternate installers ;-)
> 
> Harald

Best,
Johannes


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