[Mailman-Developers] Speeding up Mailman

[Barry A. Warsaw]

Here's a bit of low-hanging fruit that might speed up Mailman.  I
don't know exactly by how much, but it works by starting Python with
the -S option.  On my Sparc boxes I've seen 4-8x improvement in the
startup times of the Python executable.  I've tested the patch in that
I'm sure it works, but I haven't put it in the python.org operation
system yet.  I plan on doing that next.

Note that this only works for the CGI and mail wrappers, not the
bin scripts, but it should still help out a lot.

Let me know if you give this a shot, and whether you see any
improvement or not.  Thanks to Jeremy Hylton for the inspiration.

-Barry

-------------------- snip snip --------------------
Index: common.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /projects/cvsroot/mailman/src/common.c,v
retrieving revision 1.18
retrieving revision 1.19
diff -c -r1.18 -r1.19
*** common.c	1999/07/12 20:32:59	1.18
--- common.c	1999/10/29 15:06:43	1.19
***************
*** 196,212 ****
  	newenv[j] = NULL;
  
  	/* Now put together argv.  This will contain first the absolute path
! 	 * to the python executable, then the absolute path to the script,
! 	 * then any additional args passed in argv above.
  	 */
! 	newargv = (char**)malloc(sizeof(char*) * (argc + 2));
! 	newargv[0] = python;
! 	newargv[1] = (char*)malloc(sizeof(char) * (
  		strlen(scriptdir) +
  		strlen(script) +
  		1));
! 	strcpy(newargv[1], scriptdir);
! 	strcat(newargv[1], script);
  
  	/* now tack on all the rest of the arguments.  we can skip argv's
  	 * first two arguments because, for cgi-wrapper there is only argv[0].
--- 196,215 ----
  	newenv[j] = NULL;
  
  	/* Now put together argv.  This will contain first the absolute path
! 	 * to the Python executable, then the -S option (to speed executable
! 	 * start times), then the absolute path to the script, then any
! 	 * additional args passed in argv above.
  	 */
! 	newargv = (char**)malloc(sizeof(char*) * (argc + 3));
! 	j = 0;
! 	newargv[j++] = python;
! 	newargv[j++] = "-S";
! 	newargv[j] = (char*)malloc(sizeof(char) * (
  		strlen(scriptdir) +
  		strlen(script) +
  		1));
! 	strcpy(newargv[j], scriptdir);
! 	strcat(newargv[j], script);
  
  	/* now tack on all the rest of the arguments.  we can skip argv's
  	 * first two arguments because, for cgi-wrapper there is only argv[0].
***************
*** 218,227 ****
  	 *
  	 * TBD: have to make sure this works with alias-wrapper.
  	 */
! 	for (i = 2; i < argc; i++)
! 		newargv[i] = argv[i];
  
! 	newargv[i] = NULL;
  
  	/* return always means failure */
  	(void)execve(python, &newargv[0], &newenv[0]);
--- 221,230 ----
  	 *
  	 * TBD: have to make sure this works with alias-wrapper.
  	 */
! 	for (i=2, j++; i < argc; i++)
! 		newargv[j++] = argv[i];
  
! 	newargv[j] = NULL;
  
  	/* return always means failure */
  	(void)execve(python, &newargv[0], &newenv[0]);