In the spirit of equal opportunity annoyance :

One of the things that never fails to irritate me with Red Hat is thatwhen you do ' /bin/su root ' on astock system, you get a shell whose $PATH doesn't include /sbin or /usr/sbin .

This trips me up all the time, and every time it's an nngh moment. Andit's not as if Red Hat doesn't already have a ~root/.bashrc that doesquite a lot

My problem with benchmarking is that it's tedious (and finicky). Goodbenchmarking mostly consists of twiddling my thumbs while my tests run,often yet again after some minor tweak or improvement or additionalcase. I can kill days running tests and staring at numbers and not reallyget anywhere (and sometimes I've had to).

All that said, after my entry on some regular expression performancesurprises , I got curious enoughto do more detailed micro-benchmarking. With Daniel Martin 's assistance I was