[r-t] Big searches

[Mark Davies]

RG writes,

> I have never counted nodes per se - always thought it too expensive to do
> it.

I don't think it is... you can normally hide a counter update in the
pipeline in such a way that it gets issued to an ALU slot that otherwise
would be idle. Or even if not, it's probably only half a cycle you've lost 
per loop iteration. Slightly more expensive if you're in a higher-level 
language, but then everything else takes longer, too.

MBD