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Apurdue.266 net.bugs.2bsd utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!purdue!cak Sat Apr 24 21:25:47 1982 Re: My experiences Re: Extremeley slow ex/vi on 2.8

Boy, did you ever hit a sore spot there! At cincy one night (this is on an 11/23, by the way), we started a vmstat 5 on one terminal and a vi on another, with nothing else on the system. Typing a carriage return caused about 180 overlay switches. It got progressively worse from there. The 'smart' display update algorithm takes more real-time to compute the best way to display the changes from, say, a ^D, than it would take to repaint the whole scheme brute force.

Consultation with Carl Smith led us to the conclusion that the overlays for the version 3 ex were tossed together one night, found to work on a reasonably fast machine, and left untouched. Highly unsatisfactory.

I left cincy soon after this, but we never popularized ex for this reason (almost all our users were new to Unix and didn't know any better). Jim Reuter took over my job, and was going to look into this, but I don't know what he's achieved. I'm sure he'll comment.

The Makefile for overlaid ex appeared early in this newsgroup, perhaps Carl can retransmit it from the archives.

Bill Jolitz has let it be known that in 2.81, the overlay overhead should be much less than currently (I have a number of 10% of current overhead in mind, but I'm not at all sure that it's correct -- take it with a couple of grains of salt).

Cheers, Chris Kent

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