Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!samsung!think.com!barmar From: barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals Subject: Re: What does SUID, SGID and Sticky bits do on inappropriate files? Message-ID: <1990Dec29.165803.13809@Think.COM> Date: 29 Dec 90 16:58:03 GMT References: <1990Dec28.234940.24202@odin.diku.dk> Sender: news@Think.COM Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA Lines: 20 In article bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) writes: [Regarding sticky executables] >The major speedup is/was/might-have-been due to the kernel being able >to pull an executable image from swap faster than from the file system >(no chasing of indirect blocks and so forth), and the possibility that >it was still in memory which was faster still. > >The more recent file systems which cause text to page in place make >this consideration more or less obsolete. Actually, this is still useful on dataless workstations. Our dataless workstations have local swap, /, and /usr, but /usr/local generally comes from an NFS server. We've noticed significant performance improvement by setting the sticky bit on Lisp images, as it effectively causes the workstations to use their local swap space as a cache. -- Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp. barmar@think.com {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar