NAME

       lat_pipe - measure interprocess communication latency through pipes

SYNOPSIS

       lat_pipe [ -P <parallelism> ] [ -W <warmups> ] [ -N <repetitions> ]

DESCRIPTION

       lat_pipe  uses  two  processes  communicating  through a Unix pipe to measure interprocess
       communication latencies.  The benchmark passes a token back  and  forth  between  the  two
       processes  (this  sort  of  benchmark  is  frequently  referred  to  as  a  ``hot potato''
       benchmark).  No other work is done in the processes.

OUTPUT

       The reported time is in microseconds per round trip and includes the total time, i.e., the
       context switching overhead is includeded.  Output format is like so

       Pipe latency: 491 microseconds

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

       Funding  for  the  development  of  this  tool  was  provided by Sun Microsystems Computer
       Corporation.

SEE ALSO

       lmbench(8).

AUTHOR

       Carl Staelin and Larry McVoy

       Comments, suggestions, and bug reports are always welcome.

(c)1994 Larry McVoy                           $Date$                                  LAT_PIPE(8)