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Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 21:57:37 -0800 (PST)
From: Don Lewis <truckman@FreeBSD.org>
To: rwatson@FreeBSD.org
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Subject: Re: Unfortunate dynamic linking for everything
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On 18 Nov, Robert Watson wrote:

> (2) Shells again, because they will be fork()d and exec()d frequently
>     during heavily scripted activities, such as system boot, periodic
>     events, large make jobs, etc.  And presumably the only shell of
>     interest is sh, although some of the supporting non-builtin binaries
>     may also be of interest. 

You left out my favorite fork()/exec() intensive exmple, our ports
system.  During portupgrade, visible activity can grind stop for quite a
while at the "Registering installation" stage, while top's "last pid"
field increases rapidly and system CPU time is an embarrassingly large
number, and this is with a static /bin and /sbin.

Rather than trying to re-"optimize" this by converting /bin/sh back to
being static, I think a got more could be gained by re-writing this part
of the ports infrastructure to be more efficient.  I'm not volunteering
...