On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 30, 2004 at 04:50:31PM +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
>>
>>> I'm claiming that your expectations are way out of line.  You're trying to
>>> work with data and executables that are somewhere between one and two
>>> orders
>>> of magnitude as large as they were when the amount of memory on your system
>>> was appropriate for its job -- yet expecting performance to be good with
>>> default system tuning.  I think that's absurd, and I think that changing
>>> the
>>> default system tuning to accomodate this use would probably break more than
>>> it fixes.
>>
>> But actually, if we're talking in perspective to what we did/have 20 years
>> ago, I'm asking way less now. Back in the '80s, the memory demands far
>> outpaced the supply. Memory was much more scarce then, even compared to
>> the usage. So, if anything, we have a situation nowadays making much less
>> demands on the machine and OS.
>
> I don't agree.  My 11/750 had 6MB.  csh and vi totalled to a few tens
> of kilobytes -- most of which was shared, no matter how many users ran
> them.

Obviously, we have different perspectives here then... :-)
And I'm not sure I buy that few tens of KB for vi. :-)
Oh, and 6 MB was a quite loaded 11/750.

> Your box has 128MB total, right?  Well, you've said you're running netscape;
> that's a single 40MB process.  The numbers just don't add up.

Yes, and I'm not claiming that everything will fit into memory at the same 
time. I'm just saying that the wrong things are in memory. The machine can 
be really zippy, and also perform all the different services I require of 
it, with the memory it have. The problem is that the default tuning in 
NetBSD currently makes it perform very badly at something it did perform 
good on in the past, and which it can perform good at even now, but I now 
needs to turn the knobs.

(How much memory do you think each user could use on that PDP-11/70. 
RSTS/E didn't have shared memory stuff, and we're talking 40 users at a 
total memory of 512 KB, of which the OS probably used around 100K. That 
means an average of just 10K per user.)

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol