Swapper question.

[S. Zirin]

In article <4787 at killer.UUCP>, fmayhar at killer.UUCP (Frank Mayhar) writes:
> I have a question, related to our development work on a 68020-based SVR2 system:
> Why does swapper rack up so much CPU?  In spite of the fact that the machine is
> completely idle for days at a time, swapper's CPU stays roughly even with the
> amount of time that the system has been up, to within about a minute.  What
> gives, and how can we change this?  The machine will run as an intelligent
> peripheral for a mainframe, and we're trying to maximize performance.

There are several ports of the UNIX Operating System that incorrectly
attribute clock ticks during the idle loop to the swapper (PID 0).  The sar(1)
command on these systems usually shows zero idle time with a very high
number in the "sys" column.

A peek at the os/clock.c source module will tell you for sure.

Seth Zirin
att!packard!shz