Xref: utzoo comp.os.vms:8818 comp.unix.wizards:11265 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cbmvax!snark!eric From: eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) Newsgroups: comp.os.vms,comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: VMS vs. UNIX file system Summary: Clean design makes the difference Message-ID:Date: 20 Sep 88 16:44:59 GMT References: <411@marob.masa.com> <178@arnold.uucp> <3442@crash.cts.com> <13608@mimsy.uucp> Organization: Justified Ancients of Muammu Lines: 20 In article <13608@mimsy.uucp>, chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes: > (Henry Spencer and Geoff Collyer rewrote the B news software and got > a similar order of magnitude performance increase, without changing > the file formats at all.) And I did likewise, with similar results, for B3.0. Chris is, as usual, quite correct; the fault lies not in our file formats, but in our code. The major win was just eliminating the fork-per-article overhead in the unbatcher. The principle exemplified here bears repeating yet again: A CLEAN DESIGN IS THE ROYAL ROAD TO SPEEDY CODE and fiddling with flat-vs-ISAM files, clever code hacks or other 'micro-level' optimizations is usually a recipe for lots of pain with very little gain. -- Eric S. Raymond (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews) UUCP: ...!{uunet,att,rutgers}!snark!eric = eric@snark.UUCP Post: 22 S. Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355 Phone: (215)-296-5718