Emacs and vi: efficiency

[Chris Torek]

In article <539 at goanna.oz> wjb at goanna.oz (Warwick Bolam) writes:
>Does anyone have any figures on the resources required by vi and
>emacs?  On our system (Vax11/750, 4.2BSD) emacs runs very slowly
>and consumes lots of cpu.

I hate to perpetuate the editor wars.  On the other hand, I seem
to be one of a few who can be relatively objective, since I regularly
use both Emacs and vi.  Anyway:

Our Emacs (local version of UniPress) tends to use more memory and
the same or slightly less total CPU to edit files.  It uses marginally
more CPU time when people do fancy things with it (monitor the time
and load, e.g.).  About half the people who use Emacs do fancy
things.  I suspect your 750 is memory-poor or is running an untuned
Emacs (there are no doubt many untuned Emacses out there).

The difference in resource load is unnoticeable on all our machines
except the Suns, most which have insufficient virtual memory space
(backing store).  Running several Emacses (Emice?) within Suntools is
guaranteed to fail.  A few of the Suns have expanded swap areas; on
these the difference in resource load is once again unnoticeable.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 1516)
UUCP:	seismo!umcp-cs!chris
CSNet:	chris at umcp-cs		ARPA:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu