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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.sys5
Subject: Re: Shell Scripts v. Command Options
Message-ID: <19394:Jan1917:08:2691@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 19 Jan 91 17:08:26 GMT
References: <18946@rpp386.cactus.org> <1249:Jan1811:37:3991@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <18959@rpp386.cactus.org>
Organization: IR
Lines: 16

In article <18959@rpp386.cactus.org> jfh@rpp386.cactus.org (John F Haugh II) writes:
> Had you looked at the test data you would see that the CPU time is
> actually spent in the kernel executing code.

Apparently the system is idle in your tests; many if not most schedulers
will add disk wait time to the system time of the current process.

> In the case you gave of a large page size architecture, fork() should
> still take very little time since there need not be any physical I/O
> unless the available memory is consumed

Available (physical) memory is quite often consumed, and the average
executable is swapped out. At NYU we actually use computers for
computing things, ya know?

---Dan