Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!occrsh!uokmax!apple!usc!ucsd!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ames!uhccux!munnari.oz.au!sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au!augean!sibyl!ian
From: ian@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ (Ian Dall)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Speed costs (Re: MWC's Coherent - A Lemon...)
Message-ID: <647@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ>
Date: 2 Jun 90 16:23:30 GMT
References: <2793@crash.cts.com> <265D2FE5.2513@tct.uucp> <640@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ> <136298@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Reply-To: ian@sibyl.OZ (Ian Dall)
Organization: Engineering, Uni of Adelaide, Australia
Lines: 36
X-Local-Date: 2 Jun 90 09:23:30 PDT

In article <136298@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> lm@sun.UUCP (Larry McVoy) writes:
>In article <640@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ> ian@sibyl.OZ (Ian Dall) writes:
>>Not entirely. Sure it would be nice if all code was compact, but
>>achieving it isn't free......
>> We all have to get used to the fact
>>that memory is now about $80/MB and swap space is about $10/MB. By the
>>time the project you are working on is finished, these prices might
>>have halved. There is just no point in being too stingy with either!
>
>Yes there is.  It takes time to load that 5meg application.  Disk time,
>page fault time.  It takes cache lines, which are not plentiful.

Don't forget the "too" I put in front of "stingy". I never claimed that
program size wasn't a consideration, only that it wasn't as important
a consideration as it used to be. 1.3M does sound too big for an
xclock.  (Makes emacs seem lean and mean!)  We have all our xclients
compiled with dynamic libraries here, so it is hard to check. It would
be interesting to work out what the effective working set is.

One point about programs which use "standard" libraries is that simple
programs tend to be big but complex programs are not all that much
bigger (the libraries get loaded in both cases). That is to say that
the relationship between executable size and apparant complexity is
not linear.

I noticed very early in my fore mentioned PDP-11 programming era that
a (very) small fortran program actually generated quite a large
executable because it pulled in most of the run time support library.
Perhaps a similar thing happens with X libraries. None of which should
be taken to mean that I think 1.3MB is reasonable for an X clock. If
your figures are accurate, some effort should be spent determining
why.

-- 
Ian Dall     life (n). A sexually transmitted disease which afflicts
                       some people more severely than others.