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From: estes@iris.ucdavis.edu (Robert Estes)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: HP 9000/835 memory usage (System crawling ...)
Message-ID: <7679@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Date: 11 Sep 90 19:03:18 GMT
Sender: usenet@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu
Reply-To: estes@iris.ucdavis.edu (Robert Estes)
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Organization: U.C. Davis - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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We have an 835 running version 7.0 of hpux (Release A.B7.00 B) that
seriously bogs down when we run more than a couple of jobs simultaneously.
The `boblem seems to revolve around memory usage...we have 16M of memory and
do a lot of image processing (programs are memory hogs).  

Typically, if no one is on the console running X, we're fine.  
But when someone is running X, the load average may shoot up 8, or more, 
due to the initiation of one of our programs (or any other memory hog),
which can slow the system to an unusable pace -> interactive jobs getting
serviced once/minute, etc.

It gas suggested that the problem has to do with the swapping strategy - 
the operating system has to swap in the entire working enfironment for 
a job, before giving it its time slice.  Since our jobs use a lot of memory, 
most of the processors time is spent swapping the contents of memory.

1. Is that how the swapping is done?

2. Other than purchasing more memory, is there anything we can do to 
   alter/alleviate this behavior?

Any help would be appreciated.  E-mail is fine.

Thanks,  Robert