Marshalling/unmarshalling costs

[Martin Langhoff]

Looking at the datastore code,  I suspect that a good chunk of our
time is going into unmarshalling/marshalling data that we send over
D-Bus.

Has anyone looked at this at all? Any facts to support/dispel what is
basically a gut-feeling?

D-Bus is a nice IPC, for sure (yummy syntactic sugarfor ye olde
socket), but in the bits of code I've looked at, it seems like we are
using it to pass actual data. Ooops! Marshalling/unmarshalling costs
in cpu and memory for any sizable data are murder.

What D-Bus is designed for - with all its transparent
marshal/unmarshal magic - is sending easy-to-use signals, with perhaps
a tiny bit of data as payload. But unbound data needs to be dealt with
via other means - let the D-Bus message point to where the actual data
is.

cheers,



m
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