Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!dave
From: dave@lsuc.uucp (David Sherman)
Newsgroups: can.uucp
Subject: Re: size of smail
Summary: small is beautiful
Message-ID: <1989Jan2.222329.27995@lsuc.uucp>
Date: 3 Jan 89 03:23:26 GMT
References: <1989Jan2.001754.11708@ziebmef.uucp>
Distribution: can
Organization: Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto
Lines: 30

In article <1989Jan2.001754.11708@ziebmef.uucp> cks@ziebmef.UUCP (Chris Siebenmann) writes:
>In article <428@aurora.auvax.uucp> lyndon@auvax.UUCP (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes:
>>In what way is smail too large?  It's running quite happily on a few
>>diskless 3/50's here (plus just about every other machine in the shop).
>>The binaries come in at roughly 250KB. That's not even *close* to the
>>size of our emacs binaries. It's also HALF the size of the paths file
>>it has to work with :-)
>
> Smail 2.5 here is 19K (using a shared library and stripped), and the
>paths file (I use a smart host) is 1K. When you only have 67M of disk
>space, such considerations matter. Since I'm a uucp-only site, all I
>really need is the bugs in smail2.5 fixed.

I agree entirely.  This old machine, with its 58 ports,
20-30 users during the day and 50 very active UUCP connections
handling about 10Mb/day has 960K of memory, of which over 200K
is taken up by the kernel.  Back in the Good Old Days, people
considered 1Mb a large amount of memory.  smail here is 56K.
I sure wouldn't like to see it become 250K.  (No paging here
either -- this is v7, so if you swap out a process it's the
whole process.)

And no, we can't increase the amount of memory on the machine.

David Sherman
The Law Society of Upper Canada
Toronto
-- 
Moderator, mail.yiddish
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