Subject: Re: S L O O O O W MV2 source tarball unrolling?????
To: NetBSD Bob <nbsdbob@weedcon1.cropsci.ncsu.edu>
From: Tom Ivar Helbekkmo <tih@kpnQwest.no>
List: port-vax
Date: 10/26/2000 12:47:03
NetBSD Bob <nbsdbob@weedcon1.cropsci.ncsu.edu> writes:

> I was unrolling the source tarballs of current on an MV2 last night,
> and started the tar -xpzf yadayada thing, and 7 hours later it was
> still spinning the head actuator motor back and forth and back and
> forth.

A few days ago, you posted something about the ordering of the boards
in this machine, saying:

> I saw in an openvms wizard note that the order should be:
> 
>      tape - disk - serial - network - ram - cpu

You (or the author of the note you read) must have misunderstood this.
Higher priority is closer to the CPU (lower slot numbers), and the
ordering you need is more like:

        cpu, ram, tape, serial, network, disk

...although there are individual differences between different serial
controllers, say, that mean that some of them can be low priority,
while others (the DHV-11 comes to mind) need to be way up there.  In
your case, you definitely want that tape controller way up the chain,
in order to keep it streaming.

On one of my PDP-11 systems, running 2.11BSD, the time to write one
whole TK50 (~90MB) came down from 15 hours to 40 minutes by moving the
controller up to the top of the bus!  Streaming is good!  :-)

-tih
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