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From: mangler@cit-vax.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: /usr a misnomer? (was File Syst
Message-ID: <2159@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: Mon, 30-Mar-87 02:20:38 EST
Article-I.D.: cit-vax.2159
Posted: Mon Mar 30 02:20:38 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 31-Mar-87 04:42:34 EST
References: <5034@brl-adm.ARPA> <816@nrcvax.UUCP>
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 14
Summary: symbolic links

In article <816@nrcvax.UUCP>, chris@nrcvax.UUCP (Chris Grevstad) writes:
> Which prompts the question:  what is the performance hit for translating the
> symbolic link?

With NFS, it can be *very* high.  We had 15 Suns sharing a single /usr,
each getting 18 rwho packets per minute, and doing creat's on pathnames
of the form "/usr/spool/rwho/whod.%s", with /usr/spool being a symbolic
link.  The server for /usr was spending 50% of its cpu capacity servicing
these symbolic link lookups, day and night.

You would be amazed what a chdir() in the right place can do.  (It seems
that just about everybody has come up with a similar fix, except Sun).

Don Speck   speck@vlsi.caltech.edu  {seismo,rutgers,ames}!cit-vax!speck