In a module with 100,000 exports, the load time goes from 20+ seconds to a couple hundred milliseconds on my machine. In the case of 10,000 exports, it's a couple hundred milliseconds down to tens of milliseconds.

This change will qsort the array once at the end of export section loading.

I was initially hoping that sorting the exports themselves by name would allow a binary search implementation in all the wasm_runtime_lookup_... functions, but as you observed in #3407, this causes other problems. Your solution would require keeping 2*ExportCount pointers in memory while the module is loaded, is this OK?

In a module with 100,000 exports, the load time goes from 20+ seconds to a couple hundred milliseconds on my machine. In the case of 10,000 exports, it's a couple hundred milliseconds down to tens of milliseconds.

This change will qsort the array once at the end of export section loading.

OK, got it, it really improves a lot. It only allocates memory one time and qsort the array one time.

I was initially hoping that sorting the exports themselves by name would allow a binary search implementation in all the wasm_runtime_lookup_... functions, but as you observed in #3407, this causes other problems. Your solution would require keeping 2*ExportCount pointers in memory while the module is loaded, is this OK?

Keeping 2 * export_count pointers really consumes a lot of memory. IIUC, maybe we can just use a uint32 array (e.g. uint32 *export_iths_of_sorted_name) to save each export's ith of a temporary sorted export array, which is sorted by name. And then use binary-search to lookup to export, and get the export name with exports[export_iths_of_sorted_name[i] in the lookup.

@sjamesr I got an idea to improve the performance of wasm_runtime_lookup_function and submitted PR #3865, could you help check it? Thanks.

#3865 was more like my first approach of sorting the exports in place, but I couldn't figure out why the CI was failing. You've fixed that, so I think that approach is obviously better

#3865 was more like my first approach of sorting the exports in place, but I couldn't figure out why the CI was failing. You've fixed that, so I think that approach is obviously better

But #3865 only optimizes wasm_runtime_lookup_function, it doesn't refine the wasm/aot loading process. I am not sure why you close this PR? The idea looks good.

I misunderstood your other change, I thought you had a better way to fix performance in the loader as well, I'll reopen this one and address your comments.

@wenyongh This should be good for another look, thank you for your comments