Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:08:31 +0100 From: Bernd Walter <ticso@cicely12.cicely.de> To: "Matthew D. Fuller" <fullermd@over-yonder.net> Cc: stable@freebsd.org, current@freebsd.org, Alex Zbyslaw <xfb52@dial.pipex.com> Subject: Re: /usr/share/man/man8/MAKEDEV.8 Message-ID: <20071031190830.GJ82954@cicely12.cicely.de> In-Reply-To: <20071031143923.GA1580@over-yonder.net> References: <47240A15.8080305@charter.net> <20071028074248.GA1511@haakonia.hitnet.RWTH-Aachen.DE> <alpine.BSF.0.9999.0710280131220.2400@qbhto.arg> <4724BAD9.7000400@charter.net> <20071028164152.GA7516@eos.sc1.parodius.com> <E1ImBHh-000OiV-Mc@cs1.cs.huji.ac.il> <4724BEB3.5080905@charter.net> <20071029132447.GA2658@kobe.laptop> <4727063E.7060107@dial.pipex.com> <20071031143923.GA1580@over-yonder.net>
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On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 09:39:23AM -0500, Matthew D. Fuller wrote: > On Tue, Oct 30, 2007 at 10:23:58AM +0000 I heard the voice of > Alex Zbyslaw, and lo! it spake thus: > > > > Of course, with modern systems where nroff-ing a man page takes > > negligible time and system resources, it could also be argued that > > cat-ed man pages should be a thing of the past :-) > > Quite. I don't completly agree. Many people forget that FreeBSD is used on slow embedded systems as well and I prefer having manpoages there as well. > The slowest machine I currently have running (to get slower, I'd have > to dig in my closet) is my laptop, which is a P54 Pentium 133MHz, with > 32 megs of RAM and a hard drive that runs in PIO mode. It's running a > 2002-vintage RELENG_4, on which the largest manpage is perlfunc(1) (at > 71k). On the first run without the manpage in cache: > > % time sh -c 'man perlfunc > /dev/null' > 6.881u 0.204s 0:07.22 98.0% 173+581k 8+0io 0pf+0w [73]arm9# time sh -c 'man perlfunc > /dev/null' Formatting page, please wait...Done. 76.000u 5.000s 3:21.21 40.8% 2269+36014k 35+1io 27pf+0w [74]arm9# time sh -c 'man ls > /dev/null' Formatting page, please wait...Done. 15.000u 1.000s 0:45.48 38.3% 3286+30833k 18+1io 1pf+0w This was on an AT91RM9200 based system. It wasn't completely idle, since it is currently routing my DSL connection, but you get the point. > A while, but hardly an eternity. A more typical manpage like ls takes > 3 seconds. On a less ancient machine (but still a few generations > back; Athlon 1.25GHz, few month old RELENG_6), the biggest manpage is > perltoc(1) at 150k. A cold cache run there takes just over 2 seconds. > On my workstation (dual Athlon 1.4, HEAD), I've got > wireshark-filter(4) at a whopping 746k. That takes about 8 seconds. > Second place is gcc at 158k, which takes about 1. > > > So, yes; outside of rather special cases, catpages deserve to enjoy > their retirement at this point 8-} arm based FreeBSD is not that common, but 486 classed systems like Soekris are very commonly used. I wouldn't call it that special. -- B.Walter http://www.bwct.de http://www.fizon.de bernd@bwct.de info@bwct.de support@fizon.de
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