Re: FLAME medm

[watson@cebaf.gov]

John said:

>I am not saying that DM should be dumped, it is a VERY useful tool.  What I
>am saying is that I think most of the feuding about this stuff started on
>something that was an effeciency issue to LANL that is probably no longer a 
>reasonable arguement.

I wish it were so.  In fact, we have many screens that take well over
10 seconds to load on a fast machine, and a factor of 2 matters.  In addition,
dm uses approximately 1/2 the CPU resources to animate the display.
Yes you can always throw more CPU at it, but for fixed resources would
you not rather have a program 2x as fast?

Suppose dm can make a display that looks like medm?

>I have never looked at the binary format for DM, but unless you are doing a 
>variable-sized record format, I actually think that an ascii one COULD come
>close to both size and speed

If ascii could be made as fast as binary, I agree -- dump the binary.  However,
while I'm willing to eat 2x performance loss to boot an IOC (this is an event
which SHOULD not happen often), the same hit to pop a display is worth
avoiding if possible.  I think for the ascii database the hit is more in
the neighborhood of 20%.  Anything in the 10% range which gives valuable
new functionality or maintainability is worth it (anyone notice the plug
for cdev implied here?)

Chip