Date:        Sun, 28 Jan 2001 18:54:39 +0900
    From:        Bang Jun-Young <bjy@mogua.org>
    Message-ID:  <3A73EC5F.E9B29EBC@mogua.org>

ps:

  | $ ls -l /usr/bin | wc -l
  |      352

ls -l of /usr/bin is also not a very good test for this - the time
taken to actually stat all those 352 files (which is a constant
independent of the console device) is biasing your results.

It could be that that's as much as half of the wscons output, which
would mean that your console driver may be taking 3 times as much
CPU time as it does.

The times here are also biased by how many of the inodes from /usr/bin
are in the vnode cache when you run the test - if lots of them are,
things will use less time than if none of them are.

I suggest getting a 1000 line text file (or usr /usr/share/dict/words)
cat that to /dev/null so it is all loaded into the buffer cache, and
then cat it to the console and time that.   cat uses essentially no
cpu time (especially if the data is already loaded from disk), so this
will be a much better estimate of how much time is being used by the
console drivers.

kre