Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!spool.mu.edu!agate!bionet!parc!mdixon From: mdixon@parc.xerox.com (Mike Dixon) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Memory Message-ID: Date: 17 Jun 91 17:53:17 GMT References: <1991Jun14.125927.18256@neon.Stanford.EDU> <1991Jun15.193723.14916@math.ucla.edu> Sender: news@parc.xerox.com Distribution: comp Organization: Xerox PARC Lines: 28 Here's a snapshot of my ambient processes for the above experiments: (If you have any tips to speed things up, let me know!) feynman>ps -augx USER %CPU %MEM VSIZE RSIZE TT STAT TIME COMMAND root 121 27.9 2.0 1.24M 160K a R 166h h- std.9600 ttya (getty) me 878 14.3 33.4 7.43M 2.67M ? S 374:03 - console (WindowServer) ... here's a tip: that first line says that over 1/4 of your cpu time is being wasted on a getty process that's waiting for someone to log on over serial port a. this happens because of some screw up that sends getty into a loop repeating the login prompt over and over and over again when the device on the other end of the line is turned off/not responding. there doesn't seem to be a good way to fix it yet; i su and 'kill -STOP' the getty process (you then have to 'kill -CONT' it again before you'll be able to log in). (i wrote a little perl script to do this semi-automatically). if you find a better solution, i'd like to hear about it... (some posts have claimed that switching to ttyda made the problem go away; that didn't reliably fix it for me.) .mike. -- .mike.