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From: dg@wrs.UUCP (David Goodenough)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Faster/cheaper execution of Unix pipelines?  A proposal.
Message-ID: <428@wrs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 26-Oct-87 16:09:37 EST
Article-I.D.: wrs.428
Posted: Mon Oct 26 16:09:37 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Oct-87 06:38:29 EST
References: <385@ohlone.UUCP> <3126@ames.arpa>
Reply-To: dg@wrs.UUCP (David Goodenough)
Organization: Wind River Systems, Emeryville, CA
Lines: 21
Keywords: Unix pipes, program composition, small is beautiful

I seem to remember hearing somewhere that BSD4.2/3 do pipes with sockets.
I am not that much of a UNIX guru, but I have been lead to believe that
sockets largely keep their stuff in memory - hence reads and writes are
mainly going to be memory - memory copies. IF this is true it strikes
me that piping under BSD4.2 is not as expensive as all that; and with
the use of vfork the fork/execl cost is not too high. I tend to favour
the "lots of small programs piped together" approach (ever since I used
unix utilities and the /usr/man/cat* text to create a dictionary out
of thin air one afternoon), although I agree that to novices it does
create a bit of a learning curve.
--
		dg@wrs.UUCP - David Goodenough

		..... !rtech!--\
				>--!wrs!dg
		  ..... !sun!--/

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