Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!cmcl2!husc6!mailrus!umix!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen
From: davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: news software speedup
Message-ID: <10128@steinmetz.steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 27 Mar 88 22:45:32 GMT
References: <649@bms-at.UUCP> <10150@ncc.UUCP> <4246@hoptoad.uucp>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 40

In article <4246@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
|  [...]
| Saying "we shouldn't speed up netnews with a new architecture because of a
| System V bug" is like saying "we shouldn't run netnews in the current
| architecture because a System V bug loses inodes when you do".  The
| solution is to fix the bug, not to stop working on making netnews faster
| and easier to manage.

You stated that pretty poorly. Obviously having the ulimit (or any other
configurable parameter) set to an inappropriate value is a "vendor
problem" rather than a "System V bug." There is a fix for that at boot
time, but I don't remember what it is just now, although I used some
time ago.

I think it would be unwise to speed up expire or anything else by using
3-4 MB of memory (forgive me if I misread your intension). There are a
LOT of machines which don't have that much memory, real or virtual. The
use of a dbm allows fast access to data too large for memory.

AT&T states that Xenix represents 60+% of all systems sold (by systems,
not users). Add in the unix-pc and other small boxes, and it seems that
there are more systems which would have trouble than would not. Add in
the VAXen which wouldn't like someone running a 3-4MB program even with
virtual memory, and it's probably not a good idea.

I think news has done a good job of balancing efficiency with
usefulness, and I would hate to have a new version not usable on all the
PDP-11's, AT's, unix-pc's, small VAXen, etc. There are a lot of diskless
workstations which wouldn't do well paging over a network, either.

I hope I misread your comment, or that you were making it as an
observation, rather than what was really intended or desirable. If
programs on large memory machines can run faster, great, I will use all
the memory in my personal system, while sparing the little box I use at
work.

-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me