Re: Speed of rc

[Chris Siebenmann <cks>]

 Interestingly, I ran similar tests to John Mackin's, and got more or less
the reverse of his results; on a DECstation 5000/133 with everything on a
fairly pokey and slow local disk, the sh './xx' case was noticably slower
than the rc case. I've seen these numbers replicated across some other
machines (including a SunOS box in my testing, although it was hard to
get a consistent load average on that machine).

 Here are the numbers themselves:
! : whirlwind.sys ; l=(1 2 3 4 5)
! : whirlwind.sys ; for (i in $l) {/bin/time sh -c 'cat pus2 | ./rc.gcc'}
!        25.0 real         1.0 user        22.2 sys  
!        24.3 real         1.1 user        21.8 sys  
!        25.1 real         1.1 user        22.4 sys  
!        24.2 real         1.0 user        21.7 sys  
!        23.1 real         1.0 user        21.4 sys  
! : whirlwind.sys ; for (i in $l) {/bin/time sh -c 'cat pus2 | ./rc.c89'}
!        25.5 real         0.9 user        22.2 sys  
!        24.0 real         1.1 user        21.8 sys  
!        26.6 real         1.0 user        23.1 sys  
!        23.8 real         1.1 user        21.7 sys  
!        25.3 real         0.9 user        22.9 sys  
! : whirlwind.sys ; for (i in $l) {/bin/time sh -c 'cat pus2 | /bin/sh'}
!        30.4 real         9.0 user        20.1 sys  
!        31.0 real         9.1 user        20.3 sys  
!        30.7 real         9.2 user        20.2 sys  
!        29.4 real         8.9 user        19.7 sys  
!        29.4 real         8.9 user        19.8 sys  
[rc.gcc and rc.c89 are rc binaries compiled with gcc 2.2.2 and DEC's
 c89 ANSI compiler, respectively.]

	- cks