Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au!hydra!francis
From: francis@cs.ua.oz.au (Francis Vaughan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.encore
Subject: Re: Multimax thrashing
Message-ID: <2166@sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au>
Date: 12 Dec 90 09:28:05 GMT
References: <1990Dec3.170300.14750@newcastle.ac.uk> <130064@infocenter.encore.com>
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Reply-To: francis@cs.adelaide.edu.au
Organization: Adelaide Univerity, Computer Science
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In article <130064@infocenter.encore.com>, gharel@encore.com (Guy Harel)
writes:
|> From article <1990Dec3.170300.14750@newcastle.ac.uk>, by
C.R.Ritson@newcastle.ac.uk (C.R. Ritson):
|> > We have an encore multimax that is overloaded.  We cannot at this time
|> > afford more memory for it.
|> > 
|> Use 'sar -AO' to collect data. Trim down your disk buffers to a minimal.
|> Scan and flush more aggressively to free up pages quickier. You should see
|> a net difference.

Que? what is this command 'sar'? It is not on our system nor in any man pages.
However we are running UMAX 4.3 (R4_0.0), never seen 4_1.0 in Australia unlike
the poster from the UK.

I wonder if some of the memory thrashing obseved is due to the problem in
the memory manager that locks down copy-on-write pages. Any sign of this being
fixed? Our perception (on our machine anyway) is that this is costing us about
half the performace of our machine. We are not happy. 
(Machine is 48MB, 4xXPC, EMC & MSC)

Encore memory is completely unaffordable and way over the odds price/megabyte.
We can buy a complete dual processor Solbourne with disk and 64MB of memory
for the same price as Encore want for a single 64MB card. 

For further comparison DG will sell us memory for their top end 88000 machines 
at less than half the price that Encore want, They also will sell us a
complete 
dual processor 88k machine for only a little more than an Encore 64MB board, 
thats 48MB + 2BG disk, ready to go. We can buy 450MB of 4MB simms or over
1200MB of 1MB simms for the same money. 

Where are the Encore 88k boards? Will Encore provide a sensible trade in 
agreement  on 16MB cards for 64MB cards, since the 16MB cards won't work 
with the 88k boards?


						Francis Vaughan.

(An otherwise happy Encore customer who belives that a good
company is going to drive itself down the gurgler if it doesn't
sharpen up its act.)