[Gnash-dev] oprofile difficulties, easy access to debuginfo, and other thoughts

[Michael Stone]

Dear gnash folks,

I just wanted to mention to you that Bernie Innocenti and I spent a few minutes
together last week trying to learn something about why gnash stutters on
assorted content on our Rawhide and Debian Sid machines.

We approached the problem via oprofile and learned two things:

  1. gnash-0.8.6-1 spends tons of time (on our systems and test cases) calling
     memset(). We're kind of curious as to why but...

  2. we can't get any data on what gnash is doing the rest of the time
     because we don't have access to appropriate debugging symbols.

We tried for some time to acquire appropriate debugging symbols, e.g., in my
case, via debug.debian.org and via the instructions at 

  http://wiki.debian.org/DebugPackage

but, unfortunately, we were completely unsuccessful. Hence this brief note,
which exists merely to let you know that there are a couple of people out there
(like Bernie and me) who would like to understand gnash better but who are
having difficulty doing so because we ran into lots of little roadblocks that
exceeded our time+energy budget for the evening.

Lastly, if there's a simple solution out there or reason why our approach was
doomed from the start, then I'd also appreciate it if you could link to it a
little bit more prominently from your wiki since Google doesn't seem to know
anything about it. (Try, e.g., "gnash debug info", "gnash oprofile", "gnash
profiling"; the latter query is the only one with real results on the first
page and they say nothing at all about oprofile).

Kind regards, 

Michael

P.S. - Thanks again for all your hard work; gnash-0.8.6 is a definite
improvement from where I sit.