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From: glenn@rigel.econ.uga.edu (Glenn F. Leavell)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.open-look
Subject: Re: Will more memory really help OpenWindows on a Sun 3/50?
Message-ID: <1991Feb14.152820.8194@rigel.econ.uga.edu>
Date: 14 Feb 91 15:28:20 GMT
Sender: glenn@rigel.econ.uga.edu (Glenn F. Leavell)
Organization: University of Georgia Economics Department
Lines: 50

I recently wrote the following here in comp.window.open-look:

>I have a Sun 3/50 with the standard 4Meg of memory.  I've been thinking of
>upgrading its memory so that I can efficiently run OpenWindows.  Is it worth
>it?  I've heard from some people that it's not even worth trying to run
>OpenWindows on a Sun 3/50.  Does anyone out there run OpenWindows on
>such a machine, and what kind of performance do you get?

Thanks for the responses.  The consensus seems to be that upgrading
from 4Meg to 8 or 12Meg will allow Open Windows 2 to run reasonably well.
However, several people warned that the 3/50 should be used exclusively 
for the OW, and that most real work (applications, etc.) should be done
on remote machines.

There were several interesting points, which I'll share:

Rich Kaul wrote:
>It's quite slow, even on an 8Mbyte 3/50 with X11ONLY defined -- I
>can't image what it's like for you with 4Mbytes.  And the swapping
>traffic on your server is about 4 times what it is with the standard
>MIT X11R4.  We dumped OW and went with the MIT stuff for our 3/50s
>(and even on our SLCs since the server really didn't need the extra
>swapping traffic).

Kerry Alt wrote:
>xterms are MUCH faster than cmd-tools, so always run them instead.
>In any event, I feel that all sun 3's NEED at least 8mb and a math
>coprocessor (mc8881, I think).

Kari Syst wrote that a friend of his was successfully running OW on an
8Meg 3/50, but added:
>However, when he saw me plaing with OW on SS1, he became jealous.

Marcel Bernards wrote that he experiences reasonable speed with OW2
on an 8 or 12Meg 3/50, but warned:
>However running devguide ( OW userinterface builder from Sun )
>is not as pleasant as it should be.

Thanks again to the following people who responded:

Rich Kaul (kaul@icarus.eng.ohio-state.edu)
Kelvin Don Nilsen (kelvin@kickapoo.cs.iastate.edu)
Kerry Alt (kalt@NMSU.Edu)
Kari Syst (ks@tut.fi)
Marcel Bernards (bernards%ecn.nl@uga.cc.uga.edu)


-- 
Glenn F. Leavell  Systems Administrator  glenn@rigel.econ.uga.edu  404-542-3488
 University of Georgia Economics Department. 147 Brooks Hall. Athens, GA 30602