SCO UNIX Development

[Terry Hull]

In article <1989Nov15.140120.6287 at b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us> zeeff at b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us (Jon Zeeff) writes:
>>  If this is a common problem Xenix may be with us. I was planning to
>>upgrade in January, but any less performance would be unacceptable. Do
>>other people find that news bogs the machine?
>
>Not any more.  Get C News + the various speedups and NICE changes I've done
>and you don't even notice when news is running.

Sorry, you missed the point here.  I wrote the article about there
being a problem on SCO UNIX when news was running.  The point was not
that news was a problem undex UNIX, the point was that anything that
is extremely disk intensive causes a problem.  You only solve a small
part of the problem by making news more efficient.  What happens when
someone is running a cpio pipeline through compress?  This also slows
my SCO UNIX system down to a standstill.  Sure, it also slowed the
Xenix system, but the slowdown was much less with SCO XENIX 2.3.
Unfortunately, I do not have numbers for you, all I have is the
impressions I get while trying to get work done.

Another interesting thing I have seen is with XENIX, even when my disk 
was extremely busy the disk activity light would flash.  Now with UNIX,
it stays on for seconds to minutes at a time.  BTW:  I jacked the number
of disk buffers up to 2048 from 600 and it helped some, but not much.  
I have 8MB of memory in the system, so it is still not swapping.  

-- 
Terry Hull 
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Kansas State University
Work:  terry at eecea.eece.ksu.edu, rutgers!ksuvax1!eecea!terry
Play:  terry at tah386.manhattan.ks.us, rutgers!ksuvax1!eecea!tah386!terry