voeckler writes:

... I kindly disagree that 4k is enough for everybody.

I don't mean to be difficult but that's not what graff said. What he said was 4k a compromise that didn't adversely impact the implementation of perl for majority of users. I'm sure the 4k number is tied to the 'small' sbrk request size, so I'm think increasing beyond 4k is going to mean tweeking malloc. Perhaps also increasing the number of buffers used in parsing an input stream into line chunks.

Now for one of those dumb, it's-not-my-budget, questions: Why not buy ( or ask for) a bigger local disk? 8GB is small now days.