VMS vs. UNIX file system

[Eric S. Raymond]

In article <13608 at mimsy.uucp>, chris at mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
> (Henry Spencer and Geoff Collyer rewrote the B news software and got
> a similar order of magnitude performance increase, without changing
> the file formats at all.)

And I did likewise, with similar results, for B3.0. Chris is, as usual, quite
correct; the fault lies not in our file formats, but in our code. The major
win was just eliminating the fork-per-article overhead in the unbatcher.

The principle exemplified here bears repeating yet again:

	A CLEAN DESIGN IS THE ROYAL ROAD TO SPEEDY CODE

and fiddling with flat-vs-ISAM files, clever code hacks or other 'micro-level'
optimizations is usually a recipe for lots of pain with very little gain.

-- 
      Eric S. Raymond                     (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)
      UUCP: ...!{uunet,att,rutgers}!snark!eric = eric at snark.UUCP
      Post: 22 S. Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355      Phone: (215)-296-5718