Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!sun-spots-request
From: ittc!fbresz@uunet.uu.net
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: Re: Funny thing with the clock under Sunview
Keywords: Miscellaneous
Message-ID: <9901@brazos.Rice.edu>
Date: 14 Jul 90 04:12:58 GMT
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X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 9, Issue 259, message 9

In article <9782@brazos.Rice.edu> Detlev_Seidel_UNIV_OF_HANOVER%eurokom.ie@cunyvm.cuny.edu writes:

>Then somebody clicked the clock icon, I believe, or even nobody did
>anything. But the clock started rotating at a fairly decent speed. The
>speed was actually dependent on the output rate of the tar command. When
>big files were shown little output came to the screen and the speed of the
>clock got up to 1-2Hz. The date didn't change, by the way.  Did anybody
>ever observe something like this?

Sounds like you went into the 'test' feature of the clock.  I call this
the time warp feature.  It just spins the minute hand and moves the hour
hand accordingly, if you watch carefully the second hand doesn't move.
But anyway you get this by typing a 't' into the clock (usually when it is
open but perhaps even when it is closed.)  [I do this when I want people
to go away.  I tell them they have 15 minutes, turn the clock into test
and tell them time is up.]

As you can imagine doing all of that updating of the screen takes some cpu
and you probably noticed a slowdown because when there were a lot of
little files the cpu also had to update the screen to have all those file
names on it.  When there was a big file the i/o system was busy and the
cpu could spin the clock really fast.