Re: invoking gunzip.exe

[Matthew Woehlke]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> Eric Blake writes:
> > Another benefit of making gunzip a full-blown executable rather than a
> > shell wrapper is that the startup time is faster (and on cygwin and mingw,
> > the extra process and time of a shell script wrapper is noticeable).
>
> But no extra process is involved here; the shell script does not fork.
>
> > Uncompressing is a common task, and should not be artificially slowed down
> > because a shell script is in the mix when a binary could do the job.
>
> The overhead is so small on my Debian stable host (with a 5-year-old
> CPU) that I can't easily measure it.  Perhaps things are different on
> Cygwin but I suspect in practice the overhead is relatively small
> there, too.

If you're talking about fork(), the overhead of fork() on Cygwin is 
*NOT* inconsequential. If you're doing a lot of it, it can in fact be 
very, very nasty. The reason is that there is no such thing as fork() on 
Windows, so IIRC it is necessary to recreate the complete process space. 
It's like the bad old days before copy-on-write was standard AND you 
have to re-run all the process space initialization code.

--
Matthew
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