On 4/16/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Steve King</b> &lt;<a href="mailto:steve@narbat.com">steve@narbat.com</a>&gt; wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I&#39;m mostly concerned about the disk I/O needed to load up the command<br>interpreter, plus the CPU time for the interpreter to initialize itself.</blockquote><div><br>Yeah, that makes a massive difference. After I sent the message you quote, I tried timing vfork()+execve(), and it&#39;s more than 100x slower than vfork() alone. Not really surprising. I still think the staggering efficiency of Unix vfork() is one of the wonders of the computing world, but maybe that&#39;s not altogether relevant. :-)
<br></div><br>All the same, you don&#39;t know it&#39;s going to be too slow until you&#39;ve tried it and it is.<br><br><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
It seems to me that spawning a new process for (on average) one out of six<br>
keystrokes is excessive. &nbsp;Just sayin&#39;. :-)<br>
</blockquote><br>Excessive ... in a good way? :-)<br><br>Robin<br><br></div>