Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!bywater!arnor!russia.watson.ibm.com!r0nick From: r0nick@arnor.uucp Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: IBM RS6000 Message-ID: <1991Jan16.183836.28998@arnor.uucp> Date: 16 Jan 91 18:38:36 GMT References: <1991Jan10.214122.9506@news.arc.nasa.gov> Sender: news@arnor.uucp (NNTP News Poster) Reply-To: r0nick@russia.watson.ibm.com (Nicholas Carter) Organization: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Lines: 15 The comment that the RISC System/6000 (I have to use the official name) seems to slow down too much with background jobs is contrary to my experience. I've been using a model 320 with 32Mb RAM since June, and have found very little slowdown of interactive response time when running background jobs. If another job is running in the foreground, in another window for example, there is considerable slowdown, but the main impact that a background job has is a small delay if the machine is left untouched for a while as the X code is paged back into RAM. These machines do seem to need lots of RAM to perform well, more than seems common on other workstations. You didn't mention exactly what system you were using, so I can't comment on that, but IBM seems to be pushing systems with far too little RAM (8-16Mb in the desktop). -Nick Carter Note: I am a co-op employee. Don't even consider the idea of thinking that what I've said is in any way IBM's opinion.