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From: obrien%pluto@RAND-UNIX.arpa
Newsgroups: net.unix
Subject: Re: Memory impact on performance of Sun3
Message-ID: <4975@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 28-Oct-86 17:42:17 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.4975
Posted: Tue Oct 28 17:42:17 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 28-Oct-86 21:46:23 EST
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	Judging from our experience here, I would say that you gain quite
a bit in speed by going from 4 to 8 Meg on a 3/75.  We find that a
"normal" Suntools environment, for us, (consisting of about 6 or 7 windows)
causes the 3/75 to page madly just running the Sun utilities, let
alone any substantial application code.  Going from 4 to 8 Meg seems to
let us keep a real working set in physical memory.  I would not recommend
less than 8 Meg for any workstation.

	If the file server is also used as a workstation the same applies.
However, we do not see much performance degradation in a 4 Meg server
over an 8 Meg server, so long as no one logs in.  I personally am less
certain of this result, however, since we haven't actually tried to
measure it.  The performance improvement in 8 Meg over 4 Meg in a
workstation, however, is immediate and dramatic.

	This is, of course, for systems running 3.0.  The way Sun
software grows (and grows and grows and...), all bets are off with
the next major release.