[Kstars-devel] Binary star data loading accomplished in Branch!

[James Bowlin]

On Mon June 2 2008, Akarsh Simha wrote:
> And This is from the branch!!!
> ------------------------------
> kstars(9469) StarComponent::readData: Loaded  41560  stars in  1747
> ms

Good work.  Congratulations.  As the saying goes, now you have your foot 
in the door.

If I did the arithmetic correctly, the  above numbers come to 42 
microseconds per star.   it would be great if we could eventually cut 
this down to 20 or even 10 microseconds.  Do you see any easy ways to 
make it go faster?  For example, are you still using explicit 
StarObject constructors?

One of the next steps might be to create a StarBlock for each trixel
and load the stars directly into the StarBlock without using 
constructors.  This will start to mimic how we will load stars 
dynamically.

A StarBlock should probably be created with a single parameter in the 
constructor, maxNumStars, specifying the number of stars in the 
StarBlock.  The StarBlock will be constructed normally but it will 
contain a pointer to StarObject that will point to a block of memory we 
malloc() to have enough room to contain maxNumStars StarObjects.

The StarBlock itself will contain other "book-keeping" fields such as 
numStars (the actual number of stars in the StarBlock).

Are you dealing with star names?  I think it is fine to ignore them
for now.  But if you are dealing with names it might be good to load
the entire starnames file into memory to avoid extra seeks while loading
stars.  Once the stars are loaded, the memory for the names can be 
freed.


-- 
Peace, James