Friday, July 3, 2015

How many is too many?

Trivia question: when you run a random configure scripts, how many processes does it spawn?

Before reading further, try to think of the answer by yourself. Just do it. Pick a number you think is the correct answer.

Measuring this is simple. You can do it with the following command:

strace -c -f -e trace=fork,vfork,clone,execve bash -c ./configure

Different configure scripts have different results, of course. I ran this on the configure script of RPM, which I happened to have handy.

And the correct answer is ...

... 6611.

Aren't you glad that processes are cheap?

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