[cairo] Issues with Store-Bought v. Home-Grown builds of Cairo
Jennifer Adams
jma at cola.iges.org
Fri Jan 21 09:31:50 PST 2011
Dear Experts,
I apologize in advance for a long email ... I'm just trying to be
thorough. The bottom line is my own build of Cairo compared with the
macports/yum build is MUCH too slow, and I don't know why.
I am working toward getting Cairo to handle all the graphics for
GrADS, an open-source program for the analysis and display of
meteorological data. The old way of doing graphics in GrADS was a
combination of direct calls to the X11 library (for the X window
interface), calls to the gd library (for image output), plus some
extremely dated code to create postscript output. All text was drawn
in Hershey fonts. Cairo improves on this mish-mash in so many ways;
the graphics are looking absolutely fantastic, the toy font API is
adequate for our needs, and I know my users are going to be very
excited when they see these improvements.
For GrADS distribution, I provide binary executables for a small set
of platforms, but many users must build from source. GrADS requires a
long list of supplemental libraries to fully enable all its features:
the current count is 20. With the exception of X11 and a few other
system libs, we link statically with all these supplibs, so that our
binaries are portable (some of the supplibs GrADS needs are rather
obscure.) I get the impression from browsing through the forum
archives that linking statically with Cairo isn't really the right way
to do it, so during my development and testing I have been linking
dynamically with a macports build of Cairo. It's been fine that way, a
little slower than the old way of using direct X11 calls, but not deal-
breakingly slow.
Looking forward to the time when I must put out a release, I am trying
to integrate Cairo into the GrADS autoconfiguration scripts and the
setup we have for building all the supplibs from source. I can't
assume that all my users will have macports or yum to do the dirty
work for them, so I provide a set of instructions to build the
libraries from source and link them with GrADS. It is something like
the end-to-end build instructions on the Cairo website. I try to keep
it as simple as possible, and tailor these instructions for the
specific needs of GrADS.
Testing out my home-grown Cairo recipe, it built without any problems
(specifics given below). Then I linked GrADS two ways, one with the
macports build (gfast), the other with my home-grown build (gslow).
More specifics on how I linked the executables and output from otool
are given below. The performance difference between glsow v. gfast is
astonishing. Where gfast took 1-2 seconds to draw a plot, gslow took
~100 seconds to do the same thing. I reran all these steps on our 64-
bit linux server running CentOS 5.4 and got similar results.
Thanks to earlier answers I got regarding getting cairo-trace to work,
I created a huge trace file, but I'm not sure how to interpret it. It
contained ~77,000 fills and ~10,000 strokes. I reran cairo-trace with
the --profile option and posted it at ftp://iges.org/pub/jma/gs.89039.lzma
. The output from running cairo-perf-trace on my trace file is given
below. I have no idea whether the trace info is helpful.
What I could use is some advice about linking statically v.
dynamically for my binary distributions, and some guidance for how to
build Cairo from source (with only as-needed features) and link it
with my application so that I get the same performance as the
carefully packaged, fully-enabled versions of Cairo.
Thank you!!
--Jennifer
--
Jennifer M. Adams
IGES/COLA
4041 Powder Mill Road, Suite 302
Calverton, MD 20705
jma at cola.iges.org
OS X version 10.5.8
> uname -a
Darwin Atlantic-2.local 9.8.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.8.0: Wed Jul 15
16:55:01 PDT 2009; root:xnu-1228.15.4~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
> gcc --version
i686-apple-darwin9-gcc-4.0.1 (GCC) 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5490)
Configuration options used to build cairo from source:
pkg-config-0.23
(I then set the environment vars PKG_CONFIG and PKG_CONFIG_PATH to the
appropriate places)
pixman-0.21.2
freetype-2.4.3 --without-fsspec --without-fsref --without-ats --
without-quickdraw-toolbox --without-quickdraw-carbon
fontconfig-2.8.0 --enable-libxml2 --with-freetype-config=...
cairo-1.10.2 --disable-dependency-tracking \
--enable-xlib=yes \
--enable-xml=yes \
--enable-fc=yes \
--enable-ft=yes \
--enable-xlib-xrender=no \
--enable-xcb=no \
--enable-qt=no \
--enable-quartz=no \
--enable-win32=no \
--enable-skia=no \
--enable-os2=no \
--enable-beos=no \
--enable-drm=no \
--enable-pthread \
--enable-gl=no
Linking commands used to build gfast and gslow (relevant bits
highlighed in red):
gcc -g -O2 -lSystemStubs -o gslow grads.o gxsubs.o gxmeta.o gxchpl.o
gxcntr.o gxstrm.o gxwmap.o gxshad.o gxshad2.o gaexpr.o gafunc.o
gautil.o gagx.o gscrpt.o gamach.o bufrstn.o gabufr.o gabufrtbl.o gxX.o
gxdxwd.o galloc.o gaddes.o gaio.o gacfg.o gauser.o gasdf.o gatxt.o -L/
Users/jma/supplibs/lib -lcairo -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11 /Users/jma/
supplibs/lib/libreadline.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libncurses.a /
Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libgd.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libpng12.a /
Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libz.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libjpeg.a /Users/
jma/supplibs/lib/libgrib2c.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libjasper.a /
Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libpng12.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libz.a /
Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libmfhdf.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libdf.a /
Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libudunits.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libsz.a /
Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libjpeg.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libz.a /Users/
jma/supplibs/lib/libhdf5.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libsz.a /Users/jma/
supplibs/lib/libjpeg.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libz.a /Users/jma/
supplibs/lib/libudunits.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libnetcdf.a /Users/
jma/supplibs/lib/libhdf5_hl.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libhdf5.a /Users/
jma/supplibs/lib/libz.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libsz.a /Users/jma/
supplibs/lib/libcurl.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libtiff.a /Users/jma/
supplibs/lib/libgeotiff.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libshp.a -lm
gcc -g -O2 -lSystemStubs -o gfast grads.o gxsubs.o gxmeta.o gxchpl.o
gxcntr.o gxstrm.o gxwmap.o gxshad.o gxshad2.o gaexpr.o gafunc.o
gautil.o gagx.o gscrpt.o gamach.o bufrstn.o gabufr.o gabufrtbl.o gxX.o
gxdxwd.o galloc.o gaddes.o gaio.o gacfg.o gauser.o gasdf.o gatxt.o -L/
opt/local/lib -lcairo -lX11 /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libreadline.a /
Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libncurses.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libgd.a /
Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libpng12.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libz.a /
Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libjpeg.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libgrib2c.a /
Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libjasper.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libpng12.a /
Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libz.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libmfhdf.a /
Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libdf.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libudunits.a /
Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libsz.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libjpeg.a /
Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libz.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libhdf5.a /Users/
jma/supplibs/lib/libsz.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libjpeg.a /Users/jma/
supplibs/lib/libz.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libudunits.a /Users/jma/
supplibs/lib/libnetcdf.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libhdf5_hl.a /Users/
jma/supplibs/lib/libhdf5.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libz.a /Users/jma/
supplibs/lib/libsz.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libcurl.a /Users/jma/
supplibs/lib/libtiff.a /Users/jma/supplibs/lib/libgeotiff.a /Users/jma/
supplibs/lib/libshp.a -lm
> otool -L gslow
gslow:
/Users/jma/supplibs/src/cairo/lib/libcairo.2.dylib
(compatibility version 11003.0.0, current version 11003.2.0)
/usr/X11/lib/libX11.6.dylib (compatibility version 9.0.0,
current version 9.0.0)
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0,
current version 111.1.5)
/usr/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0,
current version 1.0.0)
> otool -L gfast
gfast:
/opt/local/lib/libcairo.2.dylib (compatibility version
11003.0.0, current version 11003.0.0)
/opt/local/lib/libX11.6.dylib (compatibility version 10.0.0,
current version 10.0.0)
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0,
current version 111.1.5)
/usr/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0,
current version 1.0.0)
> cairo-perf-trace gg.88743.trace
[ # ] backend test min(s) median(s) stddev.
count
[ # ] image: pixman 0.21.2
[ 0] image gg 0.691 0.696
0.30% 6/6
[ # ] image16: pixman 0.21.2
[ 0] image16 gg 0.692 0.696
0.21% 6/6
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