Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!ucsd!rutgers!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: sticky bit
Message-ID: <325@twwells.uucp>
Date: 12 Jan 89 06:42:48 GMT
References: <18016@adm.BRL.MIL> <14750@cisunx.UUCP> <1359@mtunb.ATT.COM> <314@twwells.uucp> <8724@alice.UUCP>
Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells)
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In article <8724@alice.UUCP> debra@alice.UUCP () writes:
: In article <314@twwells.uucp> bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes:
: >... [arguments about sticky bit deleted]
: >
: >I just did my editor, compiler, make, and ls.  That seems to be
: >sufficient.
:
: Sufficient for what? I have run several tests on different systems, both
: with and without virtual memory, and have never found any improvement by
: setting the sticky bit for any program.

Program development on my system. It is a 16MHz 386, 4M RAM, 80M 28ms
seek time disk.  I run Microport's SV/386 3.0e (the latest).  Load
time on my editor, for example, is cut from about three seconds on
initial startup, to under a second. Compile times are cut similarly.
(Most of the compile time seems to be related to loading the compiler
passes!)

: Considering the annoying side-effects of sticky-bit programs (you cannot
: overwrite them easily, you cannot unmount file systems, etc) I would not
: recommend using the sticky bit anymore.

I have no problem with unmounting my /usr file system, even though I
have a sticky-bit program (my editor) on it. Overwriting, on the
other hand, still requires deleting the file first.

---
Bill
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