Slow on Windows

[stonier]

The following processes are much much slower than expected.

• catkin
• roslaunch
• non-persistent ros service calls

[stonier]

Another observation that may be connected. This was observed and discussed here on the mailing list and here on ros answers.

Some good testing there - this problem is isolated to roscpp nodes, so must be either in the xmlrpc lib or in the roscpp lib itself.

[JonathanWade]

Post for community knowledge. This bug was causing us some serious usability issues with rosbridge_suite on Win7 x64 to execution actionlib actions (C++ server) via roslibjs. Essentially, the our javascript code would run faster than rosbridge could keep up and all our results/feedback were dropping.

There may be numerous slowdown reasons in windows, but a clear culprit is the XMLRPC library in python. Digging around on the web it seems that this library (or perhaps pythons) DNS resolution, including 'localhost', is tremendously slow on Win7/8. It does not matter if localhost is explicitly set in your hosts file. As a quick test I changed my ROS_MASTER_URI env variables to be the IP address of the machines (e.g. 192.168.0.1:11311) instead of 'localhost:11311' or any other domain name. Sure enough across the board things run much, much faster including ros process startup, actions, services, etc. A quick fix is to simply set these environment variable yourself, in the long run perhaps the XMLRPC code needs to change for the windows platform ( this might be a potential fix )

I'll post on the google groups thread as well.

[stonier]

@JonathanWade thanks for the info.

[yichoe]

Each non-persistent call must take 0.1 second. Looking into here would be a reference.