On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 10:39, Soeren Sonnenburg wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 00:47, Mike Fedyk wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 12:33:12AM +0100, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> > > at a time. I have yet to understand why 'ls|cat' behaves
> > > differently, but fortunately it works and it has already saved
> > > me some useful time.
> > 
> > cat probably does some buffering for you, and sends the output to xterm in
> > larger blocks.
> 
> interestingly running ls on a remote machine in a directory with a
> similiar amount of files (local xterm with ssh connection to that
> machine) is also as fast as this ls | cat workaround...
> 

Maybe it is because the process generating the output, and the
xterm is not on the same box?  The X server gets too much time,
so the two childs (xterm and ls/whatever) do not get enough time?
And that might be why renice +10 `pidof X` helps? Although that
do not seem right, as the process level seems the same:

  xterm->bash->ssh vs xterm->bash->ls

Might be because the startup time is ruled out (maybe that is
the big issue - startup of child processes?).  Could it be that
the 'ls | cat' situation now again influence startup times (now
it is xterm->bash->ls->cat) if above could be taken as an reason?


-- 
Martin Schlemmer