On Sat, May 24, 2003 at 01:25:21PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> Between 1.6 and now, there seem to have been some major changes to the
> vm and io displays in systat.  Some are good, some are bad.  I have a
> few minor quibbles, however:
> 
> 1) In the process of making these changes, the vm screen somehow got
>    broken so that it does not reliably restore the terminal mode when
>    the program is suspended or exited.  This is extremely annoying
>    since it makes it difficult to keep a systat vmstat going in the
>    background ready for use while doing other work in a shell on
>    the same tty.

Which part of the mode isn't restored? and on what terminal type?
It appears to be ok on an xterm.

> 
> 2) The "scaling" change to the io screen is clever in that it makes
>    the visual meaning of the bars more clear, but not so clever in that
>    it removes the precise numerical value from the display completely.

But the number was only output when the bar hit 100.
If you want to see the numeric values type :nu when the iostat values
are showing.

>    In fact, if I/O throughput is hovering near a power of 10 and the
>    update interval is set to the minimum 1 second, it can become
>    impossible to read the base, read the exponent, and multiply them
>    together quickly enough to actually understand what the throughput
>    number was before the data are replaced on the screen.  Not good.

I couldn't (quite) be bothered to add some histeresis to the exponent
change....

Similarly some averaging would give a better view as to what was
happening than just the instantaneous values...

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk