Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!marque!lakesys!davef
From: davef@lakesys.UUCP (Dave Fenske)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: System performance
Summary: Disk I-O & performance
Keywords: sluggish, slow, non-existent
Message-ID: <932@lakesys.UUCP>
Date: 5 Aug 89 15:16:18 GMT
Reply-To: davef@lakesys.UUCP (Dave Fenske)
Distribution: comp.unix.wizards,comp.unix.xenix
Organization: Lake Systems - Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Lines: 17

Pardon the cross posting, but I am curious as to how much of this is peculiar
to Xenix, and how much of it is Unix.

When there is a disk intensive program running, if there is a lot of sequential
I-O, the performance level of SCO Xenix seems to drop to nill (NULL).  This
appears to be true, even if the offending process does not consume a lot of cpu
resources.   I've tried to run processes like that at a lower priority, but
the results were only marginally better.  I've also heard of this problem from
other individuals.

How much of this problem is unique to Xenix.  Is there a solution?

My speciffic problem is that when I build an 8 meg file, no other process
gets any service for sometimes 30 seconds.  This with just two users on a
16 MHz 386, w/ 4.5 megs of RAM and a hundred meg RLL disk.

DF