[cairo] Performance stress-case (librsvg)

[Daniel Amelang]

On 12/3/06, Kalle Vahlman <kalle.vahlman at gmail.com> wrote:
> In any case, the svg should be a nice test case for performance, given
> that it is obviously not a trivial one to render.

This got me thinking...one of the most valuable tools I can think of
for helping the performance effort would be something that, for a
given run, captured all external cairo calls (LD_PRELOAD style) _with_
the data passed in to the functions, and packaged all that up somehow
in a single (really big) tar file or something. Then, we have a
'replayer' that our perf tests could use to replay the sequence of
calls with that captured data contained in the tar file. I think it
would be really hard to create one that did all that automatically, as
you have to know in what cases you want to copy data that a pointer
points to (think create_for_data) and all that. And yes, the data
would need to be stored in a architecture-independent format if you
want to use it as a general perf test. But, at least we would only
have to do it for the functions in cairo.h (haha, I said _only_), and
maybe we can just start with the common ones and go from there.

I know, major blue sky here, but a guy can dream, right? It's the
weekend. Go, go gadget lazyweb!

Dan