[TxMt] Re: Re: Insert hard wraps

[Steve King]

On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Robin Houston wrote:

> I think you may be over-estimating the cost of forking. I just did a little
> test, and my G4 Powerbook can spawn and reap 90,000 processes per second.
> Your computer is probably faster than mine, and I wonder how many times you
> press space every second. :-)

I'm mostly concerned about the disk I/O needed to load up the command 
interpreter, plus the CPU time for the interpreter to initialize itself. 
My MacBook Pro is pretty disk-bound; I already get major slow-downs when 
I'm doing something disk-intensive.  Sure, most of the time the 
interpreter is going to be in the disk cache, so no hit.  But if I'm 
trying to edit a file while running a big compile job, well...

It seems to me that spawning a new process for (on average) one out of six 
keystrokes is excessive.  Just sayin'. :-)

-- 
Steve King, <steve at narbat.com>