Switching to ncurses
Miroslav Lichvar
mlichvar at redhat.com
Fri Dec 1 10:05:29 UTC 2006
On Fri, Dec 01, 2006 at 10:13:55AM +0100, Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
> While I welcome reducing the number of dupe packages, I'm
> worried by the impact of this change on the size and
> performance of many core programs.
It shouldn't be that bad.
> libncurses is much bigger than libtermcap, and also has
> oddly large .bss and .data sections:
>
> bender:/[1/0]# size /lib64/libncurses.so.5 /lib64/libtermcap.so.2
> text data bss dec hex filename
> 319006 56608 3592 379206 5c946 /lib64/libncurses.so.5
> 10483 788 112 11383 2c77 /lib64/libtermcap.so.2
>
> this is going to impact very negatively on the RSS of several
> critical programs such as bash and python.
$ ps -o rss,comm
RSS COMMAND
1428 bash_termcap
1480 bash_curses
Not sure it proves anything.
> I'm also worried that the overall time required spent for a
> fork may increase considerably.
Note that termcap has everything in one big file. A simple program
doing just tgetent() and tgetstr() is significantly faster with
ncurses.
$ time ( a=0;while [ $a -lt 1000 ]; do a=$[$a + 1] && ./testtermcap <
/dev/null &> /dev/null; done )
real 0m2.078s
user 0m1.137s
sys 0m0.936s
$ time ( a=0;while [ $a -lt 1000 ]; do a=$[$a + 1] && ./testncurses <
/dev/null &> /dev/null; done )
real 0m1.464s
user 0m0.496s
sys 0m0.962s
--
Miroslav Lichvar
More information about the fedora-devel-list
mailing list