Re: /usr/share/man/man8/MAKEDEV.8

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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Systems/Network Administrator | http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.
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