Slow performance

[VarunAgw]

I've recently installed this, but I am feeling it is bit slow

I did time tldr ls

It says:

real    0m0.477s
user    0m0.405s
sys     0m0.082s

It will be better if it can work faster. 500ms is bit too high.

[igorshubovych]

Which version of NodeJS do you have?
How fast do you think it should work?

[VarunAgw]

I checked it under v0.10.x and v4.x (both Ubuntu). I don't know exactly, but I feel 50ms will be good enough

[igorshubovych]

It runs for 310-390 ms on my MacBook Air / OSX.
Empty test.js runs for 80ms.
Gulp with no Gulpfile (so it does nothing) runs for 290-360ms.

So I would say it is hard to make it significantly faster. I may try to exclude some modules, but I doubt I can decrease even to 200 ms.

If the speed is critical for you I would recommend using either C++ or Go client:
https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr#clients

NodeJS client goals were different:

• reference client implementation
• speed of development

[rprieto]

Agreed with @igorshubovych. It would take a lot of profiling to bring it to ~200ms, not sure it's the top priority unfortunately.

But it does raise another question, having a lot of clients is nice for encouraging open-source and having lots of ideas, however it's very odd to have to

• direct people to certain clients if they want certain features, at the detriment of other features
• have to always ask which client people are using

Let's have a chat on Gitter about ways we can make this work better.

[VarunAgw]

Hi, I've created a simple script, which somewhat solved this problem (by acting as caching).

function tldr () {
    mkdir -p /tmp/tldr_cache

    if [ "--flush-cache" == $1 ]; then
        rm /tmp/tldr_cache/*
        return
    fi

    if [ "--" == "${1:0:2}" ]; then
        command tldr $*
        if [ "--help" = $1 ]; then
            echo -e "To flush the custom caching\n"
            echo -e "    $ tldr --flush-cache"
        fi
        return
    fi

    if [ -f "/tmp/tldr_cache/$1" ]; then
        cat /tmp/tldr_cache/$1
    else
        script -q -c "tldr $1" /tmp/tldr_cache/$1
        sed '1d' /tmp/tldr_cache/$1 > /tmp/tldr_cache/$1.tmp;
        mv /tmp/tldr_cache/$1.tmp /tmp/tldr_cache/$1
    fi
}

[VarunAgw]

@rprieto I personally don't like the concept of multiple clients. I tried some tldr-pages client today. Each one of them was lacking something, or was slow. So instead of 10, I'll prefer a single good client.

Like this client has color coding and now with caching I am good to go!

[waldyrious]

That's an interesting point: we could provide basic specs expected from clients, such as the ability to color tokens, perform search, caching, work on dark or light backgrounds, and so on. That way we get the benefit of clients specialized on e.g. speed, or working on specific platforms or environments, without losing on the functionality side.

[leostera]

@VarunAgw you seem to be a smart fella, why don't you have a crack at the node-client and try to make it a bit faster?

@waldyrious 👍

[amitzur]

I did a bit of profiling and it seems like the bulk of time is coming from require("request")
it takes ~250ms on my MacBook Pro

[rprieto]

Thanks for that @amitzur! Might be worth checking if we can use raw require('http') instead.

Just to confirm, if you comment out require('request') do we incur the loading time somewhere else, or does it really save 250ms? (should not crash if you have a local cache)

[amitzur]

It does take off ~50% on my machine. from 500ms to 250ms on average. There are other things I didn't find that comprise the rest 250ms

[amitzur]

require("unzip2") is also a few dozen ms

[igorshubovych]

Maybe we can use node-fetch instead of request.

[igorshubovych]

Please update to 1.4.0.
Thanks for idea and investigation!

[VarunAgw]

Thanks! That's a huge improvement