At 10:15 PM 3/20/02 -0500, Gunther Schadow wrote:
I'm certainly not complaining, just wondering and trying to
>understand what exactly it is that made people pay millions
>of dollars for a harware that was only a few years later
>outpaced by the poor man's desktop ...

It wasn't. It does thing that today's desktops can't do. When is the last 
time you got 99.999% uptime out of a PC? Even though the theoretical 
bandwidth of the PCI bus was 120+ MB/sec systems rarely achieved > 1 - 2 
MB/sec sustained throughput.

>... ... now, I don't
>know that yet, I actually don't believe it. I still suspect
>that once the bottlenecks are uncovered, I can find
>workarounds to coerce more of the idle hardware into working.

Always true. Unlike the PC there are knobs for making things faster on the VAX.

>For instance, calling GNU make with the -j option and
>calling gcc with the -pipe option appears to create a
>lot more CPU load:
>
>cpu  us%  ni%  sy%  id%    csw     sys     trap    intr     ipi   ttyin 
>ttyout
>  1  30.3  0.0  6.4 
> 63.2    89k    288k    300k    218k     13       3k    190k
>  2  22.4  0.0  1.4 
> 76.2    27k     84k     74k      0      24     481      22k
>  3  20.5  0.0  1.4 
> 78.1    28k     80k     70k      0      13     526      17k
>  4  23.1  0.0  1.5 
> 75.4    28k     86k     74k      0      25     531      23k
>  5  21.2  0.0  1.5 
> 77.3    29k     88k     72k      0      25     550      19k
>  6  19.5  0.0  1.5 
> 79.1    29k     86k     73k      0      26     600      25k
>
>that looks better, at least the others are not
>97% idle now.

Doing a parallel make would be even faster.
--Chuck