On Fri, Jan 07, 2000 at 11:49:09AM -0800, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com> wrote:
> Because system calls are performance-sensitive.
When I start top and press down the space bar (starting keypress repeat),
then this top process sucks up ALL CPU POWEER of my p-ii 333, and STILL is
unable to cope with ~30 refreshes per second.
Incidentally, top only uses sycalls to access this information it requires
(namely open/read/close ;) IT's just that it needs _hundresds_ or even
_thousands_ of syscalls.
And top is a program that is used very often.
Now, I expect only a moderate performance improvement from /proc to using
sysctl, but nevertheless, a /proc-based sysctl would be the worst of both
worlds: binary format, dog-slow.
> And flattening it out and trying to number it does not work. Never has,
> never will. It's not an enumerated space.
Definitely.
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---==---(_)__ __ ____ __ Marc Lehmann +--
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The choice of a GNU generation |
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