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From: herbert@dievms.dec.com.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.org.decus
Subject: re: Rotating light pattern under RSTS
Message-ID: <8811@decwrl.DEC.COM>
Date: Wed, 25-Mar-87 19:03:37 EST
Article-I.D.: decwrl.8811
Posted: Wed Mar 25 19:03:37 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Mar-87 03:56:19 EST
Sender: daemon@decwrl.DEC.COM
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 26

>I was surprised, and disappointed, to see that the old Star Trek blinking
>light pattern was gone.  I had never seen our console when running V8.0.
>I KNOW the lights are gone with V9.x, DEC even documents that.  Our RUN
>light is on almost constantly, even with ZERO activity, so I have a sinking
>feeling we have a runaway peripheral scarfing up cycles, which may explain
>our system sluggishness more than blaming it on CBE, etc.  In all your
>many DEC contacts, can you find out if an 11/70 running RSTS V8.0 should
>show the Star Trek rotating light display during periods of idleness???
RSTS/E V8.0 still has the idle light pattern; in fact, it is still there
in RSTS/E V9.3. The thing that we removed was the "fancy" null job
which uses supervisor mode to rotate BOTH the address and data lights.
 
Be sure that the display select switch is set to "data paths" if you
want to see the rotating lights.
 
If you suspect that you have some I/O device eating up all your
idle time, the easiest way to tell is to run the STATUS program
(if you included monitor statistics when you built your monitor)
and see what the % of idle time is. If there isn't any idle time,
the problem is most likely a terminal line which is passing transmit
data to receive data, using lots of CPU time echoing the same thing
over and over. To find this, set the input speed of each of your terminals,
one at a time, to zero, until the problem goes away.
 
Kevin Herbert
RSTS/E development