popen2 5-7 times faster (Was: Re: popen2 made >7 times faster!)

[Sverker Nilsson]

Sverker Nilsson (me)wrote:
[snip]
> The time to call out 100 times to a hello world program dropped from
> 15 seconds to 2 seconds (*). 

To clarify, this was by removing some other stuff in popen2 that wasnt
needed for the simple hello world. With all that stuff in the time
became closer to 3 seconds after the fix. I think it should be
possible to get down to 2 seconds though by rewriting the rest of the
code for popen2 in C.

> The time for 100 calls to the actual
> program I wanted to run (PGP) dropped from 18 seconds to 6 seconds.

That is, 3 seconds more than the comparable hello world.

S.