Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!aglew From: aglew@oberon.crhc.uiuc.edu (Andy Glew) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: It looks like he's at it again! Message-ID: Date: 13 Jul 90 21:58:55 GMT References: <1990Jul12.012730.4248@Stardent.COM> <64044@sgi.sgi.com> <379@e2big.mko.dec.com> Sender: usenet@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News) Organization: University of Illinois, Computer Systems Group Lines: 45 In-Reply-To: gillett@ceomax..dec.com's message of 13 Jul 90 17:37:18 GMT >>>>Often I think many programmers don't care at all how long things take. >>>>If you don't believe this, just watch a Unix workstation boot. Ten >>>>million instructions per second, and it still takes minutes to boot. >> >>>Amen to this, at least. Even some O/S programmers, who spend a lot of >>>time in the lab waiting for computers to boot up, are guilty here. > >Geez, you guys must be using the wrong iron. My fine DECstation 3100 >boots up in no time at all. Maybe you should rush to your nearest >DEC office and grab a few, eh? :-) I may regret this, but I couldn't resist. I just powercycled the DECstation 3100 that I am sitting at. Powercycled, because (1) I don't have root on this system, and (2) powercycling is effectively what you have to do in a reliable systems test, where the system has to recover after a major reconfiguration (yeah, I know about UPSes...), and (3) as one of those OS guys who has spent a lot of time in the lab waiting for computers to boot up, I know that I often have had to do it from power cycle (especially after wedging a new device in a way that reset wouldn't). A few years ago a customer gave us a <30 second boot after power cycle requirement, for a real-time OS. They wanted <10. This DECstation 3100, with 16MB of memory, and an approximately 300Mb local SCSI disk, took 8:19 (eight minutes and nineteen seconds) to reboot after powercycle. That included fsck'ing the disk. Time measured from the time I flicked the switch to the time I could log in. That may be good by UNIX standards, but it's not great. Do you want to wait that long at an ATM when the banking system is having "computer problems"? --- Yes, I know that there are a lot of things to speed up boot, including UPSes; plus, a friend of mine (hi, Eric!) wrote a memory intensive fast fsck that I heard was going into next BSD. I expect to see them soon. But they're not all here yet. -- Andy Glew, aglew@uiuc.edu