> I've got an old but trusty machine.  It's got 48MB of 70ns memory
> and one of the early 60MHz pentiums.  Nearly everything works fast
> enough, but loading even the smallest of documents into "vi" takes
> the most irritating amount of time.  (A 14MB 80ns memory/486DX2


Is it _just_ vi that is slow?  Can you do other things that use swap, or
ram that also make the machine go slow?

I've seen older broken motherboards who's L2 cache would only cache the
first 16 or 32 meg of ram, and any ram usage above that would not be
cached.  On these machines, putting in more ram actually HURT performance
because of the way some operating systems use ram (user processes tend to
get heap from high memory, which was uncached).

You could truss (I mean ktrace/kdump - sorry been using FreeBSD of late)
vi and see a bit more of what it thinks it is doing during startup.

Have you done iostat during the loading of a file in vi?  Hm -- what else
might be an issue - remote session in say, an xterm, vs on the console in
a "vt220" wsconsole console?


Just some ideas.  Good luck.

Fred

--
Fred Clift - fclift@verio.net -- Remember: If brute 
force doesn't work, you're just not using enough.