Re: cost of repeats (was Re: why is applescript so slow???)
Re: cost of repeats (was Re: why is applescript so slow???)
- Subject: Re: cost of repeats (was Re: why is applescript so slow???)
- From: Andreas Amann <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 21:38:18 -0800
well, sure, it's obvious that counting twice costs more. but in my
original example (which takes more than a minute) i'm counting to 200
(adressbook cards) not 100000! so, i'd think the main time is spend
_inside_ the reapeat not with handling the repeat loop itself.
olli
Well, the original example has some serious issues as well - I only
looked at the main loop, as represented below:
tell application "Address Book"
set refPeopleList to a reference to name of every person
repeat with pName in refPeopleList
set p to (first person whose name is pName)
if (name of every group of p) does not contain "test" then
save addressbook
end if
end repeat
end tell
This takes 32 on my computer (without the run log showing) - (I don't
have a group "test" defined).
The problem here is that you send a lot of queries to the AB - there
really is no reason to do so:
set refPeopleList to a reference to name of every person
will have the AB look of the name for every person - this will require
some time
set p to (first person whose name is pName)
will have the AB do the same thing again - it will compare pName with
the list of all names for each person - something AB has to provide
again!
So, the code above is identical to
tell application "Address Book"
repeat with p in people
if (name of every group of p) does not contain "test" then
save addressbook
end if
end repeat
end tell
which takes only 20 seconds on my computer (same conditions as above) -
we just saved more then 35% in time by rewriting the code to be more
efficient. NOTE: the AppleScript compiler does not have an optimizer
built in like other languages/compilers do - at least not one doing the
same amount of optimizations... You have to think what you ask the
program to do and whether this is really needed.
Another thing really slowing down your script is the "save addressbook"
after ever change - since you do all the changes automatically, it
shouldn't be much of a problem if AB or something else decides to fail
in the middle - you would just run the script again. Thus, I suggest
saving the db only at the very end:
tell application "Address Book"
repeat with p in people
if (name of every group of p) does not contain "test" then
--
end if
end repeat
save addressbook
end tell
This version takes only 3 seconds to run under the same conditions.
Another few things a saw looking through your code (just random
observations):
1)
on dont_copy_this(pers)
tell application "Address Book"
set w to words of (note of pers as string)
return w contains "nosync"
end tell
end dont_copy_this
Why are you taking this into words first? No need to do so, you can
simply use
on dont_copy_this(pers)
tell application "Address Book" to return (note of pers as string
contains "nosync")
end dont_copy_this
2)
on recreate_group(gName)
...
Can you possibly jump through more hoops to get the list of people in a
group?
tell application "Address Book" to set delList to people of group gName
would be so much easier, better to read (and probably faster as well -
I did not test this one...)
(I am not sure either whether you have to loop through each member of
that list to delete them, I guess "delete delList" should work as well
- I didn't try this for obvious reasons;-)
Andreas
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Applescript-users mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden