On Sunday 15 November 2009 18:32, Leslie Turriff wrote: > I wonder how intelligent the Linux pipe mechanism is? If the connection >works by something equivalent to QSAM's get/locate, put/locate, the overhead >would be miniscule; just passing pointers and reactivating the pipeline >stages?
It's not quite that smart. Linux has to copy the data from kernel-space buffers into user-space memory, at least. So even if the block of data is in the page cache, there's still a copy operation. It doesn't just give a pointer to the kernel's block to a process, which is I think what you're describing there. Thanks for the test script! I think that is a better test than mine, because it does more switching between files. BTW: I get similar results, both on a laptop and a Linux instance under z/VM, and with 500 100K files: about the same time in user-space, and the named pipe took more system time. But for these small jobs that system time could be just noise. - MacK. ----- Edmund R. MacKenty Software Architect Rocket Software 275 Grove Street · Newton, MA 02466-2272 · USA Tel: +1.617.614.4321 Email: m...@rs.com Web: www.rocketsoftware.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390