> These are all startup costs that are lost in the noise
> the longer the program runs.
This may be true for environments where people mostly run a handful of
monolithic applications (*ahem* windows) but look at typical Linuxy things
like:
make (compiler, assembler, linker processes...)
forking servers (Apache 1.x...)
*./configure scripts* (a big one!!!)
etc...
Startup cost is likely to be a big factor here...
Regards,
Dan