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.

-- 
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