Re: [PATCH] Remove useless warning from man(1)

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> As a reality cross-check: How long does the slowest system available
> take to render the largest manual page in the base installation?  If
> that's less than 5 seconds, I'd say the warning can be omitted.

I did a few quick tests on my SPARCstation-20 (hardly the slowest
sparc, and sparc is hardly the slowest port).  My SS20 is running my
mutant 1.4T, but still may be indicative; while I have nothing but
vague feel to back it up, my impression is that tools like nroff slow
down with more recent versions.

Teal deer: don't skip the warning.  (But maybe don't print it unless
nroff is taking longer than 5 seconds?)

The largest file in /usr/share/man/man* on that SS20 is ksh.1, which is
140179 octets.  But size is not the whole story; complexity matters
too.  Here are some data points.  All runs are done on that same SS20,
whose CPU is "RT620/625 @ 125 MHz".  All time figures are ±1s, because
they're based on a shell loop

for f in ...
do
	ls -l $f
	date
	nroff -mandoc < $f > /dev/null
	date
done

and then (manually) subtracting the before timestamp from the after
timestamp and editing the result into this list.

Source					Bytes	nroff time
/usr/share/man/man1/ksh.1		140179	4s
/usr/share/man/man1/gcc.1		109360	4s
/usr/share/man/man1/lex.1		104862	3s
/usr/share/man/man7/mdoc.samples.7	 69334	19s
/local/src/moussh/moussh/moussh.1	134421	26s

I included the moussh manpage - not, of course, in base - because it's
a fairly complex one.  Compared with the ksh page, it's a good example
of how complexity affects time significantly even for approximately the
same size.  (I'll be happy to send a copy of moussh.1 to anyone who
wants one, or you can git clone git://git.rodents-montreal.org/moussh
and get it from there - the one I used is from commit 4c6d154.)

I did more nroff -mandoc runs before the above, so they were all done
with approximately the same warm filesystem cache.

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