Complexity of reallocating storage (was users command crap)

[Dan Bernstein]

In article <2886 at charon.cwi.nl> dik at cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter) writes:
> Ah, but that is the problem.  Just as fast comes in flavors.  You have CPU
> time, real time, IO time and some more.  If one of the programs uses more
> passes it is not equally fast IO time wise (unless you are using SSD on
> a Cray of course).  (Moreover, a program doing IO might well block another
> program that wants to do IO.)

See, you're proving my point. You don't really care about the number of
passes; you care about speed (including any effect on the speed of other
programs). It's simply not true that any program using more passes must
use more time; that's only a rule of thumb.

Suppose you're given two programs, one of which uses fewer passes but is
twice as slow. Which do you really care about: the number of passes, or
the speed?

---Dan