[cups.development] ppdMarkOption/ppdConflicts performanceimprovement

[Michael Sweet]

Hidetomo Katsura wrote:
>> No, I mean that having that many options is unreasonable and
>> unusable, especially if those options are constrained in
>> complex ways.
>>
>> When you have 100 options, it usually means you haven't
>> exposed/expressed the complexity of your driver efficiently.
> 
> why or how is it unreasonable and unusable?

Because ordinary users have difficulty choosing among that
many options, especially when they conflict with one another.

The vast majority of drivers have 12 or less options, with
the page size option normally having the most choices.  The
reason is simple - more options than that make the driver
hard to use.

> those are real numbers in real product PPDs.
> 
> could we focus on cups rather than other components (driver, OS, and others)?
> if there are problems in other components, they need to fix it, not on this
> maling list.

We *have* focused on CUPS and we *have* implemented a five-fold
improvement in ppdConflicts that is used repeatedly by the Apple
print dialog.  Further significant improvements *may* be possible
if we spend a great deal of time optimizing ppdMarkOption for this
particular use case, however all of the testing I've done shows
that about the best we can expect without drastic changes is
between 5 and 10 percent and is hardly worth the effort.  As it
is, the current code already takes less than 1ms to execute with
large PPDs.

> ...
>> Please provide a link to such a PPD file.  I've never encountered
>> a file that big in the 13 years I've been doing printing software.
> 
> needless to say, technologies advance whether you like it or not. things get
> more and more features and options.

If you won't provide a PPD, there is NO way I can even test against
the file you are working with.

Sure, there are more options and features, but that does not have
to require more complexity!

> ...
> btw, i wasn't aware of the cups 1.1 performance issue until recently. i was
> surprised that no one did anything about it for so many years on Mac OS X.

Probably because your PPD is completely outside of the norm, and/or
not enough people have reported this problem to Apple.

> ...
> oh, and i was told that you have a great influence to Apple, so if you tell
 > ...

Sorry,  I don't have any special influence over Apple WRT their GUIs.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software          http://www.easysw.com