dan@rna.UUCP (Dan Ts'o) (08/14/84)
Hi, We are using Gosling's EMACS on a VAX 750. It seems very slow compared to VI or JOVE. Is there something we're doing wrong ? Just simple cursor motion seem to hang up and don't have a snappy response even in single-user mode. How does CCA EMACS compare ? Cheers, Dan Ts'o ...cmcl2!rna!dan
chris@umcp-cs.UUCP (08/15/84)
Well, the old version of Emacs (#85 and before) used floating point in its screen update algorithm. That tends to slow down a 750 a lot. Also, in pre-UniPress releases, the window optimization code gave up on anything harder than one-line or one-window optimizations. #264 Emacs has Gosling's fixedpoint code in display.c and his new fancier window optimizations, which handle cursor up&down motions (as long as lines don't wrap) as well as left&right motions. -- In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci (301) 454-7690 UUCP: {seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!chris CSNet: chris@umcp-cs ARPA: chris@maryland
phil@amd.UUCP (Phil Ngai) (08/16/84)
I once looked at CCA emacs (it was a couple of years old) and was horrified to find it stored all the error msgs in the program. The text was about 180K. What's worse, it allocated about 900K of bss. Needless to say, it was very slow to start up. -- amd70 is dead, tell a friend Phil Ngai (408) 982-6554 UUCPnet: {ucbvax,decwrl,ihnp4,allegra,intelca}!amd!phil ARPAnet: amd!phil@decwrl.ARPA
z@cca.UUCP (Steve Zimmerman) (08/20/84)
Phil Ngai brought up some points that I think were somewhat misleading, so I think I should clarify the record. Although CCA EMACS once had certain error and documentation messages compiled into the program, these were all moved out into separate files about two years ago, well before the first commercial release of the program. Also, the current bss storage is 420K, not 900K, and this can be further reduced for small memory configurations. However, the amount of bss storage required in no way affects the startup time of a program, as the bss simply reflects the amount of memory that is reserved for later use by the program. In terms of startup time, CCA EMACS takes about three seconds to come up on a Sun, using average size initialization files. As for efficiency, we have measured the effect of ten people using CCA EMACS on a VAX 11/780 with nothing else happening; the load average remained under one. Steve Zimmerman CCA Uniworks
phil@amd.UUCP (Phil Ngai) (08/22/84)
In my article I mentioned that the copy of CCA emacs I saw was pretty old and assumed people would understand that it might have been improved since then. Efficiency considerations aside, I did like what I saw and thought it was a good product. It sounds like Steve has improved on what I saw and made it into an even better product. -- Welcome to California. Now go home. Phil Ngai (408) 982-6554 UUCPnet: {ucbvax,decwrl,ihnp4,allegra,intelca}!amd!phil ARPAnet: amd!phil@decwrl.ARPA
andrew@orca.UUCP (Andrew Klossner) (08/23/84)
[] "However, the amount of bss storage required in no way affects the startup time of a program, as the bss simply reflects the amount of memory that is reserved for later use by the program." I wish this were so, but in fact startup time includes a component which is linear with the size of the entire program (text+data+bss) because the system has to preallocate that much swap space. I regularly run a program with 200k text, 50k data, and bss larger than 1Meg. The effect of large bss upon startup time is quite noticeable. This is all under 4.2BSD. -- Andrew Klossner (decvax!tektronix!orca!andrew) [UUCP] (orca!andrew.tektronix@rand-relay) [ARPA]
z@cca.UUCP (Steve Zimmerman) (08/25/84)
[] "I regularly run a program with 200k text, 50k data, and bss larger than 1Meg. The effect of large bss upon startup time is quite noticeable." For measurement purposes, I've run CCA EMACS with a total size of over 1 megabyte as well. Although the program takes several seconds to start up, I know that it begins to execute its initialization routines within a half second of starting because these routines send strings to the terminal that can be displayed on terminals with monitor facilities. At this point, a fair amount of code has already been executed, so the real load time is probably under half a second. Compared to the overall initialization time of several seconds, this does not seem very significant. Steve Zimmerman