> Serious, I think it is time to make the change. Most systems have enough
> memory today (but unixes can not handle it - oops :-). Disk I/O is a real
> neck of a bottle in multiuser systems and therefore "-pipe" makes cc faster.
> What's about the idea to make cc a little bit more intelligent and let it
> decide alone if it should use pipes instead of disk I/O or not depending
> on the remaining physical memory? Some statistics about the static and
> dynamic memory usage calculated by the kernel would be very useful.

Why make the decitions for a sysadmin, by encoding it in the system
makefiles?

Sounds Really Stupid, to me, especially when they have a very
convenient way to "tune it" themselves.


In case it's not obvious: that way is "mount a MFS on /tmp if you have
plenty of memeory."  If you don't have lots of memory, you don't want
a MFS for /tmp, and neither do you want -pipe.  If you do have lots of
memory, you get most of the majority of -pipe from MFS.

As somebody who has N machines which _don't_ have enough memory to use
-pipe without severe slowdown, I certainly don't want it the default...


(Actually, that won't really work, because, for some INCREDIBLY
BONE-HEADED REASON, gcc puts its temporary files in /var/tmp...
However, other things i've proposed, e.g. my /etc/mk.conf PR, would
allow you to easily add -pipe to your system compiler flags, if you
want it...)


cgd