386 machine capacity

[Paul Fox]

In article <7318 at oberon.USC.EDU> farhad at corwin.usc.edu (Farhad Khansefid) writes:
>I read somewhere that the 286 machine in a multiuser environment, sharply
>degrades in performance when the number of users exceed 3 in normal 
>applications.
>
>My questions is whether anyone has used a 386 engine for more than 8 users
>running data-entry or other types of applications (not heavy calculations)
>in a xenix environment?
>		
My experiences of using Xenix/386 are that it seems to perform very
well for a single user. For multiple users, it doesnt do too badly as
long as you dont push the machine.

The hardware I use is a Compaq/386 running at 16Mhz, with a 70MB drive
and an Excelan Ethernet card.

I use it mostly as a single user, who logs in about 6 times.

One thing to be wary of is increasing the disk buffers. By default the
system uses about 20% of free memory for buffers. On a 4MB machine,
this is about 500K of disk buffers. For large compilations
I tried setting it to 1.5MB with pretty disastrous consequences.

The machine runs fine until it decides to flush the disk cache. After
a long compilation sequence, where most of the disk cache is marked dirty,
the system stops for about 10-20seconds whilst it flushes the disk
cache. On a single user system, this is unacceptable; for a multi-user
system it would be worse.

On a multi-user system where most people are running the same programs
(eg a database app), where they are not heavily creating files, then 
increasing the disk buffers can be beneficial, but if one user decides
to rebuild the database, or whatever, the other users all suffer.

I dont know if this is of any interest.
=================
     //        o      All opinions are my own.
   (O)        ( )     The powers that be ...
  /    \_____( )
 o  \         |
    /\____\__/      
  _/_/   _/_/         UUCP:     fox at alice.marlow.reuters.co.uk