Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:39:23 -0500 From: "Matthew D. Fuller" <fullermd@over-yonder.net> To: Alex Zbyslaw <xfb52@dial.pipex.com> Cc: stable@freebsd.org, current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: /usr/share/man/man8/MAKEDEV.8 Message-ID: <20071031143923.GA1580@over-yonder.net> In-Reply-To: <4727063E.7060107@dial.pipex.com> 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>
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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.
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
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-}
--
Matthew Fuller (MF4839) | fullermd@over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator | http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.
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