From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Oct 31 15:12:54 2007 Return-Path: Delivered-To: current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2FBD816A418; Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:12:54 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from fullermd@over-yonder.net) Received: from optimus.centralmiss.com (ns.centralmiss.com [206.156.254.79]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F2E7513C48E; Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:12:53 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from fullermd@over-yonder.net) Received: from draco.over-yonder.net (adsl-072-148-013-213.sip.jan.bellsouth.net [72.148.13.213]) (using TLSv1 with cipher ADH-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by optimus.centralmiss.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6A85528433; Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:39:24 -0500 (CDT) Received: by draco.over-yonder.net (Postfix, from userid 100) id 046A161C42; Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:39:24 -0500 (CDT) Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:39:23 -0500 From: "Matthew D. Fuller" To: Alex Zbyslaw Message-ID: <20071031143923.GA1580@over-yonder.net> References: <47240A15.8080305@charter.net> <20071028074248.GA1511@haakonia.hitnet.RWTH-Aachen.DE> <4724BAD9.7000400@charter.net> <20071028164152.GA7516@eos.sc1.parodius.com> <4724BEB3.5080905@charter.net> <20071029132447.GA2658@kobe.laptop> <4727063E.7060107@dial.pipex.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4727063E.7060107@dial.pipex.com> X-Editor: vi X-OS: FreeBSD User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.16-fullermd.4 (2007-06-09) Cc: stable@freebsd.org, current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: /usr/share/man/man8/MAKEDEV.8 X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:12:54 -0000 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.