Accounting woes for HCX/UX 3.0

Dr. T. Andrews tanner at cdis-1.uucp
Thu Jan 12 00:46:43 AEST 1989


In article <301 at unisol.UUCP>, haral at unisol.UUCP (Haral Tsitsivas) writes:
) This was indeed done to preserve disk space, and you will find that
) some vendors are not using comp_t fields anymore (ULTRIX 2.3 uses
) float fields).

If you no longer care about disk space usage, it would seem much
better to count things into a long instead of a float.  You'll get
more range, and your system likely won't stay up long enough to
overflow one of these.

Floats are often slow.  It is also rumoured that a 32-bit float will
use some bits for exponant (meaning that fewer bits are available to
actually contain discrete tick/IO counts before you have to start
fudging) where a 32-bit "long" uses the entire number for the
mantissa.

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