[dry] message generation extrmely slow

[dirk-thomas]

The message generation in dry packages takes a very long time (reported by @hershwg).

[dirk-thomas]

Step-by-step use case provided by Dave:

sudo emacs /opt/ros/groovy/share/roscpp/rosbuild/scripts/genmsg_cpp.py

then make it look like this:
............

import msg_gen

import sys

if len(sys.argv) > 1:
import os.path
import cProfile
outname = '/tmp/genmsg_cpp.profile.' + os.path.basename( sys.argv[1] )
cProfile.run('msg_gen.generate_messages(sys.argv)', outname)
exit

if name == "main":
msg_gen.generate_messages(sys.argv)

............
(Not very proper, but it got me a quick result without needing to understand how to set up the test environment)

Now set up the target messages:

cd ~/groovy_stacks # ...or wherever you like to check out dry packages
git clone git@github.com:ros-interactive-manipulation/object_manipulation.git
cd object_manipulation/object_manipulation_msgs

now do the regular message building step for dry packages:

make

Since step 1 was to edit the installed python script in-place, the regular message build does the profiling now. It leaves its result files in /tmp/genmsg_cpp.profile.*

Now to process the results, you need more python:

cd /tmp # ... since that is where the files are...
ipython

inside ipython I did:

import pstats
p = pstats.Stats('genmsg_cpp.profile.PlaceAction.msg')
p.strip_dirs().sort_stats('cumulative').print_stats(20)

Once you have the "p" stats object, there are lots of ways to process it. I read this page: http://docs.python.org/2/library/profile.html to learn what I know about python profiling.

[dirk-thomas]

For genmsg_cpp.py object_manipulation_msgs/msg/PickupAction.msg it takes 95s for me...

[dirk-thomas]

After these "tiny" optimizations the time is down to 1.3s...

[dirk-thomas]

The same will be the case for service...