Re: The speed of zsh

[Zoltan Hidvegi <hzoli@cs.elte.hu>]

> } The patch below improves zsh preformance by 10-15%.  An other 10% speed
> } improvement would be possible by avoiding the
> } child_block()/child_unblock() calls whenever possible (other shells do not
> } use any system calls while executing builtin-only scritpts).
> 
> I think I said before that we could avoid those if we aren't going to fork
> and if the job table is empty.  Maybe they're expensive enough to be worth
> the extra test.  On what do you base the 10% figure?

Because zsh time is 26.11s+3.00s, 94% CPU, 30.659 total while ksh is
9.99s+0.00s, 93% CPU, 10.674 total for 9999 bottles of beer.

It's clear that zsh spends 10% of the time in system calls and the only
system call used by zsh while executing non-forking builtin-only scripts is
sigprocmask (which can be easily seen using strace).

Zoltan