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From: earl@mips.UUCP (Earl Killian)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.unix.wizards,comp.os.misc
Subject: 98% in < 2s
Message-ID: <692@gumby.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 18-Sep-87 11:29:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: gumby.692
Posted: Fri Sep 18 11:29:20 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 20-Sep-87 04:54:40 EDT
References: <1665@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <8579@utzoo.UUCP> <6886@eddie.MIT.EDU> <2473@xanth.UUCP>
Lines: 16
Keywords: cost of bloated programs
Xref: mnetor comp.arch:2235 comp.unix.wizards:4324 comp.os.misc:191

In article <2473@xanth.UUCP>, kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:

> Second, another correspondent noted that in ten million process activations
> on his system, 98% took less than two seconds of cpu time.  This means that
> loading them was a significant fraction of all the work done in executing
> them.

It depends.  The realtime to vfork/exec something on my machine is
about 0.014s, or 0.7% of 2s.  So the data needs to be more complete to
make this conclusion (like how many of them were < 0.1s, where the
loading is 10% of the time).

Also be careful not to assume that because 98% of the commands
executed in < 2s that most of the work that a machine does is in such
commands.  More complete data is necessary to make that conclusion as
well.  The other 2% might execute for a long time...