hi,

how are you measuring "the number of simultaneous tasks"?
I tried running 5000 copies of "sleep 100" via

10 dualg4:~ # unlimit maxproc; repeat 5000 sh -c 'sleep 100 &'

(from tcsh), and that worked fine:

18 dualg4:~ # top | head
load averages:  1.88,  0.90,  0.38    22:04:22
5025 processes:5024 sleeping, 1 on processor

Memory: 72M Act, 79M Wired, 1217M Free


-Chuck


On Thu, Nov 07, 2002 at 08:07:40PM -0500, John Klos wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Something else has proved to be interesting regarding my PowerMac with 1.5
> gigs of memory. Many of my initial tests were done with 512 megs due to
> the fact that I was waiting for the delivery of the rest of the memory.
> 
> In my initial tests, I was able to run up to 1,700 to 1,800 tasks; later
> setups reliably stopped around 1,400 tasks (I changed the numerb of
> nvnodes configured by default, for instance).
> 
> What's really interesting, though, is when I moved from 512 megs to 1.5
> gigs, the number of simultaneous tasks dropped from slightly over 1,400 to
> 1,000.
> 
> Is the macppc pmap really this screwed up? Does anyone know what kinds of
> variables to change to try to get a more balanced system? Are there people
> out there that run large memory PowerPC systems? If not, why not?
> 
> Thanks,
> John Klos
> Sixgirls Computing Labs