Re: [GSoC 2013] Speed ups for large documents

From: Martin Sevior <msevior_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed Apr 24 2013 - 07:49:37 CEST

Hi everyone,

I suspect that most of the slowdowns will occur in the "breakSection"
method located in:

src/text/fmt/xp/ fb_ColumnBreaker.(cpp,h)

This is the code that assembles lines into columns shown on screen.

There is a nice collection of documentation on how abiword works here.

http://www.abisource.com/wiki/AbiWordDevelopment

There is a large and long discussion on performance issues on that webpage.

It is a fair bit out of date as Simon Larachelle has put in a lot of
fixes that have improved our Table performance. There have also been a
number of fixes to improve loading speed of large documents but
editing speed remains an issue that I'd like to see fixed.

To get an overall idea on how abiword works I suggest you look at the
GUADEC 4 and GAUDEC 5 presentation that have been made on abiword.
These are located on this webpage:

http://www.abisource.com/papers/

There is also a nice description on how it all works in my
linuxconf.au (2008) presentation:

http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2008/slides/083-AbiCollab.odp

Video capture:

http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2008/Wed/mel8-083.ogg

However please understand that this is a genuine research project. We
are interested in students who can identify and solve problems on
their own. So please take this information, start up your own
profiling application, and look to find out where the bottlenecks for
abiword really are.

Then explain to us in your application how you intend to fix them.

Cheers

Martin

On 24 April 2013 15:24, Sai Krishna <saikrishna17394@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Martin,
> Even I am interested in taking the "Speed Ups for Large Documents"
> project. I'm Krishna, CS student at the Indian Institute of
> Technology(IIT),Bombay.
>
> I comleted building the project.
> http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~saikrishna/build.png
>
> I want to read the base code related to the project. Can you help me
> where to start with.
>
> Thanks,
> Sai Krishna
>
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 10:22 AM, Martin Sevior <msevior@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Catalin,
>>
>> Thank you for your interest. Please subscribe to the abiword-dev
>> mailing to continue to have this conversation in public. I'm cc'ing
>> abiword-dev in this reply.
>>
>> My main suggestion is for you to investigate a profiling application
>> to directly determine what the bottlenecks are. If you use:
>>
>> http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2981.txt.utf-8
>>
>> This is a 3000-page plain text document which you can use to test
>> abiword performance. Try editting at the start and end of the
>> document. Use the results of your investigations to write your
>> application to GSoC. We're very interested in students you can frame
>> and solve problems independently.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Martin
>>
>>
>> On 24 April 2013 05:24, Catalin Usurelu <catalin.usurelu5@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> My name is Catalin Usurelu, I'm a CS student at the Politehnica
>>> University of Bucharest and I'm interested in the "Speed ups for large
>>> documents" project.
>>>
>>> I remember it was posted 2 years ago, and from what I see, last year
>>> also, so I guess either no one took it, or there were other more
>>> important projects which were selected. I didn't have much technical
>>> knowledge back then, but now I'm confident I could make important
>>> contributions to the project.
>>>
>>> I already built abiword and completed the additional requirements:
>>> http://i.imgur.com/NJCldHs.png
>>> I also noticed something ... the Insert menu button seams to grey out
>>> after inserting an image, I'll look into that.
>>>
>>> I'll try to find some bugs and fix them. If someone could point out
>>> some bugs related to the project, I would really appreciate it.
>>>
>>> Thank you,
>>> Catalin Usurelu
Received on Wed Apr 24 07:49:47 2013

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