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From: jbs@mit-eddie.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.unix.wizards,comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: Free Software Foundation (was: Re: Mach, the new standard?)
Message-ID: <6920@eddie.MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 18-Sep-87 01:54:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: eddie.6920
Posted: Fri Sep 18 01:54:11 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 19-Sep-87 15:56:09 EDT
References: <1665@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM) <8579@utzoo.UUCP) <6886@eddie.MIT.EDU) <2473@xanth.UUCP)
Reply-To: jbs@eddie.MIT.EDU (Jeff Siegal)
Organization: MIT, EE/CS Computer Facilities, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 36
Keywords: cost of bloated programs
Xref: utgpu comp.arch:2094 comp.unix.wizards:4000 comp.os.misc:179

In article <2473@xanth.UUCP) kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
)In article <6886@eddie.MIT.EDU) jbs@eddie.MIT.EDU (Jeff Siegal) writes:
))In article <8579@utzoo.UUCP) henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
)))[...]graphing the size of the ls(1) command versus
)))time is an interesting exercise[...]
))
))However, a more meaningful exercise would be to graph the cost of the
))memory used by ls(1) versus time.  [...]
)
)[...]
)We are rapidly headed toward being I/O bound simply due to program load
)costs.
)

On the system I am now on (and the Sun Henry was refering to)

% file /bin/ls
/bin/ls:	demand paged pure executable
                ^^^^^^^^^^^^

)To put it another way, graph the time to load ls(1) versus date of the
)version for the versions mentioned and the systems on which they run,
)and weep.
)
)For an example close to home, my Amiga is doing good if it can drag
)programs off a hard disk at 30K bytes/second over an SCSI interface.
)[...]

Again, if you take into account the changing conditions that exist in
computer technology, things look much better.  30KB/sec is horribly
slow for a Unix system (Most Sun's use Eagles, with rates of 1.8MB/sec
or higher).  I suspect that over the past 15 years, typical transfer
rates for disks on Unix systems have improved by at least a factor of
four, although I do not have the hard data to present here.

Jeff Siegal