On Sun, 30 Nov 2003, Howard Gibson wrote:

...

As far as a central computer is concerned, there is no free lunch.

No, but you can get a discounted lunch. Copy-on-write pages, more efficient use of cpu (on a single user box the cpu is largely idle), etc, allow for far far more efficient use of system resources.

In addition, for applications involving large binaries and/or large sets of shared libraries, that "stuff" can get shared across multiple users. For instance, if you have 10 users running 10 GNOME applications, the binaries for the apps are only loaded once, and shared across all the users. Similarly, if they are all running OpenOffice.org, much of the app should be shared, saving a pile of memory. This is NOT a help when running applications that load a lot of their runtime state using an interpreted language. - Multiple instances of Mozilla will be very costly because of the great gobs of ECMAScript. - Likewise, instances of Emacs load ELisp independently, and so a lot of that _won't_ be shared. - Apps written in Perl that use a whole lot of libraries don't get any benefit from this. -- let name="aa454" and tld="freenet.carleton.ca" in String.concat "@" [name;tld];; http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/rdbms.html Always remember that you're unique, just like everyone else. -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml