Re: is this normal?

[Bernd Sieker <bernd%techfak.uni-bielefeld.de@localhost>]

On 01.07.98, 13:28:00, Anders ali Lindgren wrote:
> 
> What puzzles me is when I run configure-scripts and make programs.
> X is rendered pretty much useless and responds to user input
> something like once a minute, and then for a fraction of a second.
> It's taken well over a minute to even see the pointer again and
> the xterms took something like 6s to scroll some text. Load averages
> aren't *that* high but... about 80% of CPU time is eaten up by
> the kernel. No wonder X is dead. In order to be able to use the

What probably takes up most of the time is swapping, and on a non-DMA
hard disk system like A4000-IDE it uses CPU-time, too.

But if you had a DMA-SCSI disk, the computer would not be much
faster, because the CPU would have to wait for the right pages to
be swapped in most of the time. Most CPU time would be shown as
"free" instead of "system".

Adding more RAM will probably ease the situation a lot, although
I knwo that this is not easily done on a stock A4000.

> computer I have to build stuff with at least nice +12. I know

Doing long compilation jobs without setting it to a high niceness
still slows X11 interaction downnoticably, and I have a fast
SCSI-Hostadapter and enough memory (64MB used by NetBSD).

> my computer is dreadfully slow by todays standards, but this seems
> insane! What's all this kernel time killing the interactivity?
> I have compiled xv-3.10a under AmigaOS using gcc-2.7.2.1 and
> some version of gmake and it happily forked but that didn't cripple
> the computer nearly as much (on the contrary it was still quite

Probably your AmigaOS does not do swapping. And Intuition only uses
a fraction of the memory that X11 uses.

> seem to have to do with the fact that my current NetBSD disk is
> an IDE disk (disk-activity was low) nor lack of memory (not much
> swap was used at all).

I still do think that it is connected.

Btw, having one compile job and X and nothing else is not considered
"high load", that term usually refers to very many processes requiring
significant amounts of CPU time.

> 
> Please, clues! :-)
> 
> /ali: Computer Science Major and aspiring cartoonist. :-) 

> * a4ooo/o4o/18Mb/46oMb/OS3.o/Ariadne/C=1942 - cogito, amiga sum *

Do you realize that computers have a special key for the digit "0"?

SCNR

> 
> 
> 

-- 
Bernd Sieker