Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!bzs
From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: What kind of things would you want in the GNU OS
Message-ID: <32745@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 11 Jun 89 01:10:37 GMT
References: <19964@adm.BRL.MIL> <1809@auspex.auspex.com>
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 25
In-reply-to: guy@auspex.auspex.com's message of 10 Jun 89 20:27:38 GMT


Re: Symbolic Links...

Also note that some vendors (eg. Encore) will store a symlink pathname
directly into the inode if it will fit (I think the cut-off was 63
chars which isn't too sleazy, I never measured the hit rate tho I
could easily I guess.) This means that getting the symlink path
requires no extra disk accesses tho chasing down the result of course
costs the same.

The moral is: before you condemn a feature just for being
non-performant make sure the implementation can't be improved.

It would also be interesting to measure these things people claim are
unacceptably non-performant. With all the caches etc I wouldn't trust
people's intuitions, they might be complaining about nothing (ok, in
certain real-time environments every cycle counts, but I doubt their
problems are solved by merely avoiding symlinks, sounds like a red
herring, and yes, I've done a fair amount of real-time stuff, in Unix
even!)
-- 
	-Barry Shein

Software Tool & Die, Purveyors to the Trade
1330 Beacon Street, Brookline, MA 02146, (617) 739-0202