*BSD News Article 32688


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
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From: aflundi@sandia.gov (Alan F Lundin)
Subject: Re: Where are the lib??.sa.?.? files in FreeBSD 1.1.5?
Message-ID: <1994Jul12.150452.21113@sandia.gov>
Reply-To: aflundi@sandia.gov (Alan F Lundin)
Organization: MDL, Sandia National Labs., Albuquerque, NM
References: <1994Jul7.220203.8632@sandia.gov> <JKH.94Jul8011514@whisker.hubbard.ie>
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 1994 15:04:52 GMT
Lines: 69

In article <JKH.94Jul8011514@whisker.hubbard.ie>,
Jordan Hubbard <jkh@whisker.hubbard.ie> wrote:
>In article <1994Jul7.220203.8632@sandia.gov> aflundi@sandia.gov (Alan F Lundin) writes:
>
>   I loaded ispell from the FreeBSD packages-1.1
>   directory and was surprised to see how long
>   it took to get started (16 sec versus about
>   7 sec on a Sun LX).  Does this have any thing
>
>Save version of ispell, I presume?

No, on checking I found Version 3.1.08 on the Sun using
/usr/dict/words+web2 for dicts and  a "strings" on
packages-1.1/ispell_bin.tgz shows version 3.1.03 in a
copyright comment.

I haven't yet tried to analyse the hashing in ispell (I
presume there is just a straight-forward hash used as an
index into the .hash files), but on the Sun, I have one
combined hash file that is 577,896 bytes, and I see that
there are two .hash files in the ispell package that are
each 4,556,688 bytes.  Perhaps the hash size is the reason
for the differences as well as two hash lookups, instead of
just one on the Sun.

>                                    How much memory on each machine?

16M with a 486/33 for FreeBSD 1.1.5R, and
32M with a SunLX running SunOS4.1.3_U2.  I
don't think either is paging though.

>   to do with excessive copy-on-write paging due
>   to a lack of shared lib .sa. files?  Are the
>
>What makes you think that the lack of .sa files causes a lot of extra
>COW operatings under FreeBSD?  I'd like to see some stats please!

I don't know that there are lots of extra COWs (I
don't have any stats).  I was just hoping to learn
something about the shared lib implementation.

If the .sa.'able data isn't put into the executable,
doesn't there have to be at least one COW for each
page in the shared lib containing that data (vs none
when that data is in the executable)?  And if that
data is sprinkled sparsely though out the share lib,
wouldn't you get an excess of data COWed?

I'm not accusing, just asking, because I really don't
know.

>   "silly archives" (is using .sa. files now
>   obselete)?
>
>They are in certain implementations.  I don't see as they're a
>necessity, if you handle your resolution of global data properly.

If proper global resolution doesn't mean
grouping the writable global data together,
could you point me to something that I can study
(source and/or docs) to understand what you mean?

Thanks (and many thanks to the core team and other
contributors for putting together such a terrific
OS!).

--alan
-- 
Alan Lundin <aflundi@sandia.gov>