[SM-Discuss] License Choices

Aaron Brice abrice2 at cox.net
Sun Jul 21 21:24:38 EDT 2002


Would be easy and interesting to compare.  I have a 1.2 GHz Athlon with
384M of memory.  I'll do a "time cast -c -r mozilla" and compare it to a
"time make" of the mozilla source in my home directory.  People with
lower and higher performance computers could maybe do the same..

On Sun, 2002-07-21 at 15:54, Phil/CERisE/KG6MBQ wrote:
> Glenn Shannon insolently stated:
> 
> > I believe the choice to use tmpfs was because compiling in memory is
> > faster.
> 
>    Ahh yes, I've heard this myth.  It sounds nice, doesn't it?  Almost
> believable.  I think there's good reason to doubt it though.
>    In theory, compiling memory is faster because memory access is
> faster than disk access.
>    In practice, where you've just unloaded a rather large tarball on
> memory, it seems destined to end up in swap which will incur disk
> access.  Two of them at minimum in fact.  One to write to virtual
> memory, the other to read it back out.
>    I'm ignoring lots of other factors considering that disk access is
> an order of magnitude slower than CPU time.  It seems like disk access
> is the thing to measure here.  With that in mind, it seems like using
> tempfs (which isn't exactly the most sophisticated fs in the world...)
> over your native filesystem (which will almost certainly be more
> sophisticated than tempfs and should have faster algorithmic run times)
> is going to hopelessly slow things down.
> 
> -Phil/CERisE
> 
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