Re: [dwm] [dmenu] help me test possibly faster dmenu_path

Neale Pickett wrote:
> Anselm,
>
> My apologies for bringing up something which has already been discussed,
> I didn't think this specific issue would have come up before!
>
> My primary machine (a shared machine on which I don't have root access)
> triggers a cache miss nearly every time with dwm_path, due to
> directories being constantly updated. This incurs a minimum 4 second
> delay, since dmenu_path rebuilds the cache before displaying the cached
> output. When I arrive at work in the morning, the delay can exceed 2
> minutes.
>
> I may be the only dmenu user with this problem of the cache missing more
> often than hitting. But since the find version appears to be up to 20x
> faster and simpler, and the only drawback is that symlinks to
> non-binaries in $PATH showed up in the menu, I thought it was worth
> bringing up here. I don't feel like my dmenu_run needs to be put into
> the distribution unless there's overwhelming support for doing so.
>
> My find version did use a GNU-ism, thank you. I've removed that; here's
> one that works on GNU find and FreeBSD find (reports on other systems
> would be welcome):
>
> find $SPATH -maxdepth 1 \( -type f -o -type l \) -perm +111 | \
> while read i; do echo ${i##*/}; done &> /dev/null
>
> Additionally, as you point out, the find version has a problem with
> symbolic links: if a symbolic link exists in the path, it isn't tested
> to see what it links *to*. This is one of the things that provides a
> significant speedup for me, since I have at least 10 NFS mounts at any
> given time, and following all those symlinks triggers the automounter.
> I think the 20-130 times speedup outweighs the rare possibility of a
> symlink in $PATH not pointing to an executable.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Neale
>
>
>
Hi,
    I actually was bothered by the cache misses too though it was less
frequent in my case. However, I found a different solution. I use the
following script instead of dmenu_run. It basically implements an LRU
eviction algorithm and allows you to store a number of commands in the
.dmenu_cache. These commands can be more general than simple executable
names and you need to type them only once. I hope you find this useful.
(you can adjust hist_size if you with to store a larger number of
commands than 77).

#!/bin/bash

exe=`cat $HOME/.dmenu_cache | dmenu ${1+"$@"}` || exit

hist_size=77;
(echo "0\$$exe" ; seq 1 $hist_size | paste -d '$' - .dmenu_cache) | sort
-t '$' -k 2,2 -u | sort -t '$' -k 1,1 | cut -d '$' -f 2 | head -n
$hist_size > .dmenu_cache.tmp ;

mv .dmenu_cache.tmp .dmenu_cache ;

exec $exe

HTH,
Pinocchio
Received on Thu Dec 18 2008 - 04:28:54 UTC