Maxima stats huge numbers of files at startup?

William Stein wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 4:41 AM, Raymond Toy <toy.raymond at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>
> We're using ecl.  You can get the exact same setup by just installing
> sage-4.2.1.
>
>   
Thanks, but no, I don't really want to install sage-4.2.1.
>> Then we can investigate why share-subdirs-list is not doing what it's
>> supposed to do.
>>     
>
> Thanks!
>   
Can you do the following experiments for me?  After starting maxima
(with or without your fix to remove all the stat'ing of files), enter
the following:

:lisp *maxima-sharedir*

That should produce a sensible value.

:lisp (directory (pathname (concatenate 'string *maxima-sharedir* "/")))

This should produce a list of one item consisting of *maxima-sharedir*
with a "/" appended.  If that works, then just run

:lisp (share-subdir-list)

This should produce a list of directories starting  from
*maxima-sharedir*, not from root.


>   
>> I run maxima across NFS, and I haven't noticed any slowdown (except that
>> it takes a while to load up the maxima binary across the network).
>>     
>
> To physically notice it depends on the speed of your NFS. E.g., on one
> of my machines the difference in startup time is about 0.4 versus 0.3.
>    This is hard to notice.    It's best to worry more about the output
> of strace than the actual observed speed, because of disk caching.
>
>   
Stracing my maxima (CVS) build on linux with ecl, I see that maxima
(from my linux box to a mac via NFS over wifi) stats just the expected
files.  To me, this means the default maxima build is doing what it's
supposed to be doing.  Perhaps sage is changing something else, somehow.

Ray