VAX 3100 Slow!

[Alan's Home for Wayward Notes File.]

In article <7453 at spdcc.SPDCC.COM>, jls2 at spdcc.COM (Jeff Stoner) writes:
> 
> 
> I am received complaints that the VAX 3100 is "intolerably slow".
> I understand that the VAX CPU will be inherently slower than the RISC ones,
> but is there anything I can do to speed up the VAX? I don't have
> Ultrix source code, but anything else would be fair game.

	The problem is that the phrase "intolerably slow" contains
	almost no information about the system performance.  It
	could be any number of things:

	o  The system is out of memory and something as simple
	   as uniconifing a window causes it to page wildly.

	o  There is a serious system problem that is causeing the
	   system to spend large amounts of time in kernel mode.
	   For example; the error logger is busy.

	o  The one user is doing multiple things in multiple windows
	   and is running the system out of; I/O capacity and/or CPU
	   capacity.

	o  The user has a low tolerence for response time and is
	   doing a reasonable amount of work.

	The problem therefore is to find out WHY the system seems
	slow, track down the cause to and fix it.  Start by using
	cpustat, vmstat and iostat to look the time spent in various
	CPU states, the amount of available memory, the amount of
	pageing, the I/O rates on the disk drives and the load average.

	If you have Internet access consider picking up a copy of
	the program Monitor from gatekeeper.dec.com.
> 
> -- 
> ====== Jeff L. Stoner === Boulder, Colo. ============ /\ = /\ ========== |


-- 
Alan Rollow				alan at nabeth.cxn.dec.com