Speed on linux: what issues are there?

Question

I have tested the Linux 7.6 version of Paratext and it seems rather slower than the Windows version. What might cause this? Is this normal behaviour? I had hoped that it might be faster since Linux generally is more responsive than Windows in my virtual machine.

Answer 1

In general yes the Linux version is slower than the windows version - largely I think do some of the libraries we use are slower than their windows counterparts. (Although over time some of these libraries are improving so some of this performance penalty should be reducing)

However It hard to tell if this is the slowness you are seeing. If there is a specific part of PT on Linux that is slow then its possible we can optimize it. (although its unlikely to be done in 7.6 due to its status).

Are you using 14.04/trusty or 16.04/xenial?

There are general things one can do to get better performance out of a VM - but given in general if your happy with your VM performance then these suggestions are unlikely to help.

Comments

Startup of Paratext takes about 5 minutes on Linux compared to Windows. Every time a window opens there is a much greater delay than for any other feature.

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Wow - that does sound slow - I just open PT 7.6 in a 16.04 VM - with 3 windows open and it took about 15s.

Opening a test project window takes 1-2s on the same VM.

If you open PT without any windows displaying how long does it take then?

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I closed all the internal PT windows and restarted the Wasta VM (~30s) then started PT7.6 - 0.20 (aka 7.6.54.10067). ‘mono’ sits at 100% CPU utilisation for quite some time (6 minutes). I have 2 cores available for the VM, 1600MB and about 900MB RAM was free during startup.

Thereafter, opening one of my common Window Combinations took about 50s, where on Windows it takes about 10s.

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I just tested 7.6 with a 14.04 VM (Virtual Box with 4096MB and 2 cores allocated) and didn’t see the slowness.

Running the following command

sudo paratext-forceshutdown.sh

kills Paratext and displays a message saying email a log file to support. (The log attempts to record what Paratext was doing when the command was run).

If you do this during the first 6 minutes of Paratext running then we might be able to see the cause of the slowness…

Answer 2

where I can download paratext 7.6 for linux?

Comments

See Is there a Paratext 7.6 beta for Linux?

Answer 3

OK I’ve done that and sent in the log file saved in /tmp