Brian Mastenbrook wrote at 03/06/2012 03:43 PM:
On my system, DrRacket 5.2.1 opens almost 1800 files to start. The vast majority (1376) are .zo files, and another 133 are uncompiled .rkt files from the Racket distribution.
It gets much faster once the files are in OS caches, which helps with successive invocations of the command-line tools.
The uncached accesses going over NFS could be especially painful, such as if you are running a copy of DrRacket from a slow NFS home dir.
(I feel for anyone who has to use NFS nowadays, such as some university communal computers are no doubt still set up to use. NFS and AFS were great 20 years ago, at least when the servers and the network were non-flaky and not oversaturated. Today, we usually want to be using our own computer with a local copy of files (or a USB flash drive with communal computers), not having every file access go out to centralized server. Popular SCM systems like Git and Subversion are good ways to replicate most of our files among systems, and permit disconnected operation in between. I'd still offer students an NFS dir they're free to use, especially new students working from lab computers, but encourage them to use their own local storage for most things. And I'd provide a big Git server with private accounts, which students may use for coursework if they wish.)
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