Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen
From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: For a good time, read...
Message-ID: <10306@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 7 Apr 88 17:09:27 GMT
References: <7841@apple.Apple.Com> <592@garth.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@kbsvax.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 21

In article <592@garth.UUCP> walter@garth.UUCP (Walter Bays) writes:
[ on the topic of memory vs. users ]

I think that this is a good point, independent of your comments on
benchmarking. As the number of users (on most systems) becomes larger,
the memory per user becomes less.

This is caused by text sharing. When only a few users are using the
machine, it is not likely that they will be running the same program at
the same time. However, as the number of users increases, there are
certain programs which are in use by a lot of users. These would be the
shell(s) popular at the site, vi, emacs, or other editor, perhaps the C
compiler, perhaps nroff, etc. This is one of the few saving graces of a
high user load.

This applies to BSD and SysV machines with users doing at least somewhat
the same thing.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me