Production Config Bundles for Fast Startup on Production Hardware

12 Apr 2020 - jab

How we make the start of your production machine fast and smooth?

YAML is quite slow to parse and reading configs dominates the startup time of MPF and MPF-MC. This is mostly fine during development and we can partially mitigate the costs by caching. However, things are different when running a production machine as caching will not work on a cold boot with a typical read-only setup. Usually production machine setups use less beefy computers with slower disks which makes thinks even worse.

To get out of this we added an production flag to MPF 0.54 which will use pre-compiled config bundles for much faster start-up times. Additionally, this will disable some expensive config and runtime validations to increase performance. Furthermore this will reduce the amount of debug output.

How does it work? First run mpf build production_bundle which will create mpf_config.bundle and mpf_mc_config.bundle. You have to recreate those files after every config, mode or show change. Those bundles include all yaml files but not any other assets (such as videos or sounds). Second, add the -P flag to the commandline to run MPF in production mode.

Find out more about it in the MPF docs about Tuning Software for Production.

Did we forget anything? Please let us know! Discussions in MPF-Users.