Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!ncar!unmvax!nmt.edu!nraoaoc From: rmilner@zia.aoc.nrao.edu (Ruth Milner) Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix Subject: Re: Page Space Problems Message-ID: <1991Mar18.214101.14152@nmt.edu> Date: 18 Mar 91 21:41:01 GMT References: <1991Mar17.185553.9181@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: rmilner@zia.aoc.nrao.edu (Ruth Milner) Organization: National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Socorro NM Lines: 31 In article <1991Mar17.185553.9181@menudo.uh.edu> jet@karazm.math.uh.edu ("J. Eric Townsend") writes: > >I called defect(ive) support, they told me "AIX does things a little >differently than UNIX", and that the swapper proc was supposed to be >~6Mb on a 8Mb RAM / 32Mb paging machine. > >It's not a bug, it's a *feature* :-( > >Again, I repeat my plea for some IBM employee to come out of the woodwork >and explain this: > >oiler> ps aux > USER PID %CPU %MEM SZ RSS TT STAT TIME CMD > root 0 0.0% 78% 7592 6376 - S 1:31 swapper I have formed the impression (nobody told me this, though) that the SZ etc. shown for swapper were not so much used by swapper as they were representative of the size of the kernel. It's a paging kernel, so not all of it has to be in memory all the time, and the size given seems to stay pretty static when you put more memory in. That's just an impression, though. IBM take note: the size of your kernel is a serious limitation for low-end systems. A 320 has really respectable floating-point performance, but our application (and probably others) needs a minimum of 32MB on an RS/6000 to run reasonably (performance almost doubled when we went from 16 to 32MB). With the price of RS/6000 memory, this really reduces its affordability as a system for small groups at universities to run our data reduction programs. -- Ruth Milner Systems Manager NRAO/VLA Socorro NM rmilner@zia.aoc.nrao.edu