Subject: RE: Time and motion studies of gcc and egcs and LCC
From: [email-masked]

5 Feb 1998 15:33:50 -0800
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]

I said:
>... but for a long running
> program such as bash or gcc, the load-time overhead is proportionally small.
> 

Sergey Okhapkin replied:
]When configure script is running, load-time Dll linkage takes about 70% of
]total execution time :-(

Oops, yes, I guess bash isn't necessarily a long running program.  Shell
scripts do tend to assume that process creation is relatively low overhead.
It is on Unix.  I guess that loading in bash and all the DLLs that it
references (actually, the closure set of referenced DLLs) just to perform
some small function may be a significant fraction of the time.  So, if it
takes 70mS to load and 30mS to run, it does get to be significant.  Especially
if you repeat this 1000 times.  If, instead, it was 70mS to load and 30,000mS
to run, then the load time would be insignificant.

Even on Unix with a less expensive fork(), running a shell script is much
less efficient than a C program that does the same thing, in part due to
the repeated costs of process creation.

marcus hall
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