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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.mel.connect.com.au!news.syd.connect.com.au!news.bri.connect.com.au!fjholden.OntheNet.com.au!not-for-mail From: Tony Griffiths <tonyg@OntheNet.com.au> Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc Subject: Re: no such thing as a "general user community" Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 12:10:25 +1000 Organization: On the Net (ISP on the Gold Coast, Australia) Lines: 65 Message-ID: <333B2891.6297@OntheNet.com.au> References: <331BB7DD.28EC@net5.net> <5g76gb$6c6@flea.best.net> <3327BBF9.784A@earthlink.net> <5g9jad$bo3@flea.best.net> <5glbkq$io6$3@kayrad.ziplink.net> <5gn615$9cu@flea.best.net> <5h92no$gua@innocence.interface-business.de> Reply-To: tonyg@OntheNet.com.au NNTP-Posting-Host: swanee.nt.com.au Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (WinNT; I) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.sco.misc:37457 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:37864 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6480 comp.sys.sgi.misc:29448 J Wunsch wrote: > > I had to give a training course about DEC Unix system administration > lately. DEC Unix wasn't a bad experience, i have to admit, in > particular if someone comes from a BSD background. It has a very > consistent documentation, i basically learnt the admin tasks within a > couple of days. And they even have implemented some neat BSD features > like ``ps alx'', including the VSZ vs. RSS figures that are sorely > missing in the SysV ps command once you know about them. From my experience of working in the (Wide Area) Networks Engineering group, I would say that FreeBSD is between Ultrix [4.3 BSD] and DEC Unix [OSF/1] in look and feel. Most of the utilities have the same switches which is goodness when compared with the operation of Solaris which is the other Unix I have to deal with! > > Anyway, i noticed that from a cursory view, most of the smaller > processes have been ranging at a VSZ of 1 MB ... 2 MB. Almost none of > them were below 1 MB. Now compare this to a typical FreeBSD ps output > you have in mind, and you'll quickly notice that this is about two or > even three times larger on DEC Unix, roughly. In fact, the binaries are on average about 2.25 - 2.5 times larger on Alpha then the equivalent VAX/i86 CISC binaries. The lack of byte and short memory addressing appears to be the cause of much of this bloat. These instructions have been added to the latest Alpha chips (EV56 and EV6) but it will be some time before they have an impact due to backward compatibility problems! > > This is nothing surprising, if you know that a RISC CPU needs two CPU > instructions in order to load a single address, and that all addresses Not entirely true if you are accessing 32 or 64-bit naturally aligned data which requires only one instruction. Anything else requires 2 to 11 instructions from (my) memory... > are 64-bit there, that you have more wasted space by padding etc. But > it simply shows that the memory requirements of the same task on an > Alpha CPU are very likely to be higher than they were on a 32-bit CISC > CPU. Instruction bloat is one thing that has an impact on main memory (and cache and TLB and ...) requirements. Obviously, a 32-bit int or 64-bit long is the same on any architecture and occupies the same amount of memory so as the data areas of a program get bigger, the relative advantage of smaller a code section decreases. > > -- > J"org Wunsch Unix support engineer > joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de http://www.interface-business.de/~j Tony