Re: Gzipping man files
>>>>> "R" == Richard Kettlewell <richard@elmail.co.uk> writes:
R> Good point, but the counterargument is that none of those have an
R> additional heavy formatting step to go through. IMHO groff is
R> already slow enough; running a gzip alongside it would, I imagine,
R> make it even worse.
Actually, (and don't laugh) now that I think about it, it is actually
possible (I didn't say probable), that gzipping the files could make
things faster.
Since disk bandwidth is much much lower than CPU speeds on the whole,
you can effectively increase your disk bandwidth by transferring
compressed data. There's actually some research here (among other
places) along those lines, using a VM system where a portion of the
oldest pages in RAM are kept compressed so that you can fit more pages
in memory before having to swap. I believe that they have seen
performance improvements in many cases. This will be even more
significant if people move to multi-CPU machines. Keeping the CPU
busy is often much harder than keeping the disk busy.
Adios
--
Rob
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