Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!bionet!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!mailrus!ncar!tank!mimsy!chris From: chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: GNU os suggestions -- system data interfaces Message-ID: <17935@mimsy.UUCP> Date: 7 Jun 89 05:22:40 GMT References: <1344@marvin.Solbourne.COM> <3307@uokmax.UUCP> Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742 Lines: 16 In article mellon@zayante.pa.dec.com (Ted Lemon) writes: >... The other part is that thrashing through the kernel's name list >takes a lot of time on small machines. ... On a typical small machine, >doing a ps is an unbelievably slow operation. Actually, under 4.2BSD on a VAX 11/785---which might not be a typical small machine, but I did profile /bin/ps---the slowest part was grubbing through /dev to figure out what to print for `tty'. As I recall, reading symbols out of /vmunix was fairly far down the list. Under 4.3BSD-tahoe, ps reads the file /etc/psdatabase for this information; psdatabase is built at boot time by running `ps -U' from /etc/rc. If you make new terminal devices, you must rerun `ps -U'. -- In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163) Domain: chris@mimsy.umd.edu Path: uunet!mimsy!chris