Fix yet for paging algorithm in MIPS Ultrix?

[Paul Killey]

We saw a problem running some (but not all) large jobs on dec stations
with 8M of ram.  This under 3.1d, but also seems to be the case with
3.1.

We got a patch tape (new versions of vm_text.o and vm_swap.o) and tried
it out.  It made things better.

The results:

On a 12M machine, the program (meta language, sml) ran using 3% of the
cpu, was swapped 32 times, and had nearly 172,000 page faults (this
from time).

With the fix, it used 13% of the cpu, and "only" was swapped 7 times
and had just under 32,000 page faults.

On a machine with 32M of ram, and without the fix applied, it used 55%
of the cpu, and had zero swaps and 426 page faults.

On the 32M machine, it runs in less than 4 minutes.  On the 8M
machines, it takes over 20 minutes.

Size on the program reports:

text    data    bss     dec     hex
2379776 1122304 0       3502080 357000

Sure, it's a jumbo and you can expect some paging overhead, but as much
as we see is a little extreme.

--paul