[Ur] Drop of several orders of magnitude in Techempower benchmarks

[Adam Chlipala]

On 8/5/19 5:17 PM, Oisín Mac Fhearaí wrote:
> Update! The good news:
> I was able to update the Dockerfile to build Ur/web from the latest 
> release tarball (basically, using the old round 16 Dockerfile with a 
> couple of small fixes like installing libicu-dev) and compare the 
> benchmarks with the version installed with apt from the Ubuntu repo. 
> The version built from the latest release was over ten times faster, 
> even running on my old laptop.
Very interesting finding!  I've asked the Debian packager if he can 
think of some build-process change there that would have introduced a 
slowdown.
> The bad news:
> The latest version of Ur appears to fail the "fortunes" test with the 
> following diff (there is more, but this seems to explain it):
>
> fortune: -<tr><td>6</td><td>Emacs is a nice operating system, but I 
> prefer UNIX. — Tom Christaensen</td></tr>
> fortune: +<tr><td>6</td><td>Emacs is a nice operating system, but I 
> prefer UNIX.  Tom Christaensen</td></tr>
> fortune: @@ -17 +17 @@
> fortune: -<tr><td>12</td><td>フレームワークのベンチマーク</td></tr>
> fortune: +<tr><td>12</td><td></td></tr>
>
> It would seem that Unicode characters are being stripped from the 
> output, causing the test to fail. I'm not familiar with exactly what 
> the test is trying to do, and I don't know much about how Ur handles 
> UTF-8.
That's odd.  I see the Unicode characters when I run that benchmark 
locally with a recent Git checkout of Ur/Web.  Are you sure you ran the 
database-setup scripts properly?  What happens when you query the 
database manually?  Are the right characters there?