Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!canon!laukee
From: laukee@canon.co.uk (David Lau-Kee)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: speed of newer versions of OpenWindows on low-end Suns
Message-ID: <1990Oct15.115820.3477@canon.co.uk>
Date: 15 Oct 90 11:58:20 GMT
References: <42929@andante.UUCP> <1990Oct13.140154@wind.Eng.Sun.COM> <1990Oct14.101954.11387@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
Reply-To: laukee@canon.co.uk
Organization: Canon Research Europe, Guildford, UK
Lines: 34

ktl@wag240.wag.caltech.edu (Kian-Tat Lim) writes:
>	Slowness involves a number of components.  Startup time is
>about 90 seconds (compared with 30 for the NeWS server on our SGI
>4D/25s).  Input-focus changes (I use "Move Pointer" focus policy) can
>take multiple seconds.  Bringing up menus can also take seconds.  This
>is with a modest set of clients: 3 cmdtool, cm, clock, mailtool,
>perfmeter, emacs (18.52 under X).
>	The culprit seems to be lack of real memory; vmstat gives a
>"fre" number less than 512K all the time, and much paging and swapping
>seems to be occurring.  The kernel has been trimmed down, but is still
>1076624 bytes (text+data+bss).

This is surprising. We ran OW2 on 4/20s with 8Mb (since upsized to 16)
and I don't remember speed problems anything like as bad as you
indicate (and this was before a proper kernel was configured).

Diskless at 16Mb startup is under 30 seconds, focus changes
and menu raises are effectively immediate.  Top says the server
sits around 3Mb resident.

Your kernel looks a little large at 1076624 bytes (text+data+bss).
We get:
jessica:ttyp0 size /vmunix
text    data    bss     dec     hex
688128  111280  33952   833360  cb750
without any sort of fiddling at all.

-------------
David Lau-Kee
Canon Research Centre Europe,
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