Re: Proposed new POSIX sh policy, version two
On Thu, Nov 23, 2006 at 07:09:49PM +0100, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 23, 2006 at 06:37:52PM +0100, David Weinehall wrote:
> > Somehow I doubt that you used today's version of bash (which I bet
> > is a lot bigger and more memory-consuming due to new features).
>
> Comparing bash from woody and sid, respectively:
>
> -rwxr-xr-x root/root 511400 2002-04-08 21:07 ./bin/bash
> -rwxr-xr-x root/root 677184 2006-10-22 15:55 ./bin/bash
>
> RSS of woody's bash is 4528 kB on my system; 4888 kB for sid's bash.
>
> So, unless you want to claim that 162 kB bigger and using 8% more memory is
> "a lot", you should probably be less careless about your betting.
Most hardware that was nice and shiny back in 2002 wasn't exactly
underpowered, seeing as the Pentium 4 and Athlon Palomino was what was
used back then. So, I kind of doubt that the statement was concerning
Woody. Try Potato or Slink.
Oh, and 8% is quite a difference if you only have a limited amount to
begin with. It's not like bash is the only thing that's bloated since
then either.
On an embedded system, 162kB more storage or 360kB more RAM *is* a big
difference.
And compared to dash, the difference is vast:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 80200 2006-11-21 16:36 /bin/dash
RSS for dash on sid seems to be 464kB. No woody to compare with.
Now the choice of 464kB or 4528kB on a desktop where you're actually
using the shell for interactive things is probably not a big deal,
personally I'd never use dash, posh, or busybox (except for rescue
purposes) on a desktop (or server, for that matter) other than for
scripts.
But for an embedded system, where the shell is only used for scripts
anyway, and for that matter, for scripts used on bootup (where speed
counts), any performance difference and every kB is gonna count.
On a machine with 64MB of RAM, a shell that takes 4.5MB of that is quite
a hog.
Regards: David
--
/) David Weinehall <tao@debian.org> /) Rime on my window (\
// ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ // Diamond-white roses of fire //
\) http://www.acc.umu.se/~tao/ (/ Beautiful hoar-frost (/
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