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

On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 09:39:23AM -0500, Matthew D. Fuller wrote:
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.

I don't completly agree.
Many people forget that FreeBSD is used on slow embedded systems
as well and I prefer having manpoages there as well.

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

[73]arm9# time sh -c 'man perlfunc > /dev/null'
Formatting page, please wait...Done.
76.000u 5.000s 3:21.21 40.8% 2269+36014k 35+1io 27pf+0w
[74]arm9# time sh -c 'man ls > /dev/null'
Formatting page, please wait...Done.
15.000u 1.000s 0:45.48 38.3% 3286+30833k 18+1io 1pf+0w

This was on an AT91RM9200 based system.
It wasn't completely idle, since it is currently routing my DSL
connection, but you get the point.

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-}

arm based FreeBSD is not that common, but 486 classed systems like
Soekris are very commonly used.
I wouldn't call it that special.

--
B.Walter http://www.bwct.de http://www.fizon.de
bernd@xxxxxxx info@xxxxxxx support@xxxxxxxx
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