Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!xanth!ukma!rutgers!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!att!whuts!homxb!opus!ki4pv!cdis-1!tanner
From: tanner@cdis-1.uucp (Dr. T. Andrews)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Accounting woes for HCX/UX 3.0
Summary: comp_t fields should assuredly NOT be float.  use unsigned long.
Keywords: accounting, UNIX, accton(2)
Message-ID: <7056@cdis-1.uucp>
Date: 11 Jan 89 14:46:43 GMT
References: <1356@mtunb.ATT.COM> <217@h.cs.wvu.wvnet.edu> <301@unisol.UUCP>
Organization: CompuData Inc, DeLand
Lines: 20

In article <301@unisol.UUCP>, haral@unisol.UUCP (Haral Tsitsivas) writes:
) This was indeed done to preserve disk space, and you will find that
) some vendors are not using comp_t fields anymore (ULTRIX 2.3 uses
) float fields).

If you no longer care about disk space usage, it would seem much
better to count things into a long instead of a float.  You'll get
more range, and your system likely won't stay up long enough to
overflow one of these.

Floats are often slow.  It is also rumoured that a 32-bit float will
use some bits for exponant (meaning that fewer bits are available to
actually contain discrete tick/IO counts before you have to start
fudging) where a 32-bit "long" uses the entire number for the
mantissa.

[ follow-ups: note that x-post to unix-questions has been eliminated ]
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