Re: [Groff] What does the "-u" in ".tmac-u" mean?

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Ingo,

> seemed to indicate that the execution time benefit is roughly
> consistent with what one would expect if it were mainly due to the
> simple reduction of the macro file size:

The rule of thumb I've often heard is the lexer is the bottleneck.  I
haven't time to dig right now, but I've one more datum to throw in.

    $ strace -fc man bash >/dev/null
    % time     seconds  usecs/call     calls    errors syscall
    ------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
     42.86    0.439904       14663        30         4 wait4
     26.86    0.275675          13     20625         2 write
     25.39    0.260614          13     20443           read
    ...

That's a large page, and it's measuring man, tbl, col, and the rest of
the gang, not just nroff processing macro files, but it shows I/O
dominates.

>  a) You mean that savings of 5-20% in execution time are
>  "significant", even though formatting with mandoc would save about
>  60-90% of formatting time instead?

Yes, because we're not moving to mandoc.  We are going to format with
nroff and troff because we like it.  :-)

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy