GNU os suggestions -- system data interfaces

[Chris Torek]

In article <MELLON.89Jun6170722 at zayante.pa.dec.com>
mellon at zayante.pa.dec.com (Ted Lemon) writes:
>... The other part is that thrashing through the kernel's name list
>takes a lot of time on small machines. ... On a typical small machine,
>doing a ps is an unbelievably slow operation.

Actually, under 4.2BSD on a VAX 11/785---which might not be a typical
small machine, but I did profile /bin/ps---the slowest part was grubbing
through /dev to figure out what to print for `tty'.  As I recall,
reading symbols out of /vmunix was fairly far down the list.  Under
4.3BSD-tahoe, ps reads the file /etc/psdatabase for this information;
psdatabase is built at boot time by running `ps -U' from /etc/rc.
If you make new terminal devices, you must rerun `ps -U'.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163)
Domain:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris