Comments
sergio: Perhaps, rather than
assuming defeat, you could spark a conversation that you
consider interesting?
ask: That 75GB IBM drive is
probably only running at 7200 RPMs, which will contribute to
the access rate, but something that might be killing you is
contention. Make sure it's on an IDE channel by itself, or
at least not on a chain with another actively-used drive
(ie. with a CDROM would be fine, but slaving with the drive
you swap to is asking for it). Given the option, unless I
know I'll never need more than two drives in a
system, SCSI is always my pick. ;-)
Work and Hacking
Finally, the two intersect. I have a question
for the audience, and it hits right to the heart of
something that I've been (peripherally, at least) sucked
into. Target platform is FreeBSD, although that's largely
irrelevant.
Say you have an application which links
implicitly to libc and a few other libraries as necessary
(libm, libsocket, etc; the usual suspects). You have a
series of shared libraries you're dlopen()ing at runtime,
some of which you've developed, and some of which you've
received from third-parties (with source). Some of these
libraries are implicitly loaded along with your main
executable, as well as with each other. Another third-party
library which you're implicitly linking your main executable
(and some dlopen()'d shared libraries with)
overrides a large number of functions in libc() and other
libraries (little things, like strlen() and fopen()). There
is no documentation regarding the interdependancies of
these libraries, so you see a rather varied mix of linking
going on in an attempt to forego problems with missing
symbols. You're seeing semi-random behavior from what should
be straightforward code.
The question, then, is two-fold:
- Is this a problem?
- If it is, what is your reaction/what do you do?
Somehow, I've become tangled in this as someone
who can provide an "expert opinion" on the subject. I need
to learn not to let on what I know about things, and just do
what needs doing.
"Keep your mouth shut, guard the senses,
and life is ever full. Open your mouth, always be busy, and
life is beyond hope." - Lao Tzu, Tao Te
Ching