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

[Rob Savoye]

On 10/12/09 18:30, Michael Stone wrote:

> 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.

  The stuttering (if you mean for video) is a known problem, there are 
some incomplete patches in the gnash-dev archives that work for some people.

> 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...

 Called from where ? I don't have oprofile setup on my other Fedora 11 
machine. Memset() is often used to set a newly allocated buffer to zeros 
to make debugging easier, but can also be a performance hog.

> 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.

  When I build Gnash from source, I get debug symbols. So I can only 
guess it's an issue with how the packages are built. Some experimental 
RPM packages I built, includingg the debug info ones are at:
http://www.getgnash.org/packages/snapshots/fedora/. These I built using 
my own gnash.spec file (which is checked into Gnash trunk). This is the 
first time I've heard any issues about the lack of debug symbols in the 
debuginfo packages. Me, I don't install packages except for my own for 
testing, which I build myself.

> 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

  Try on which machine ? An XO 1.5, standard Fedora 11, or a Debian 
machine ? I made a shot at compiling Gnash on an XO 1.5 machine, but get 
too many dependency errors when trying to install the *-devel packages 
Gnash needs. I assume I can build on my other Fedora 11 machine and just 
copy the executables over like I used to do ? Is the Gstreamer packages 
standard now, or are the

        - rob -