On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 09:29:38PM -0600, C. Bensend wrote:
> 
> Hey folks,
> 
>       I'm just curious to know what, exactly, happens during the
> "estimating" (is this the planner?) phase before a dump happens.
> 
>       I have a small network here at home, with machines ranging
> from PII-333's to a P-90.  The PII-anythings take literally seconds
> to offer up their estimates (ie, when I check an amstatus), but the
> P90 takes about 15 minutes.
> 
>       I'm just curious to know what sort of operation is happening
> that takes so long.  :)  (ie, is it mathematically intensive, or ?)
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Benny
> 
> ps:  Yes, I know my P90 is a POS.  :)

You won't get that comment from me.  Until a little while ago I was
still running Dell's 1989 unix on a 486/33.  And my primary box started
out as a P90, just changed a year before it died to a faster chip.

And to make you happier with your 15 mins, my dual 1GHz PIII, running
the cygwin client on Windows 2K takes 2 hours to estimate :((

Unfortunately no actually dumping gets done on any system until
all the estimates, including these slow ones, are done.

With tar at least (not sure about dump) what is done is a pseudo dump
to /dev/null, both at level 0 and possibly additional dumps at levels
1 and 2 and ... .  This is done to get a "size of dump" at each level.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)