Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr) Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix Subject: Re: WRONG! Keywords: xbbs reply Message-ID: <11115@steinmetz.ge.com> Date: 6 Jun 88 19:11:27 GMT References: <208@turnkey.TCC.COM> <837@.UUCP> <51@stanton.TCC.COM> Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY Lines: 73 In article <51@stanton.TCC.COM> donegan@stanton.TCC.COM (Steven P. Donegan) writes: | Gosh Peter (FLAMES ON), I have been using vi on my XBBS bulletins, control | files and motd's for ages. You tell me that it's obvious that I can't do | what I've been doing for about 2 years? I suspect he mistyped that one. I'm sure what he meant was that the message file (note singular) is fixed length records. If you have a way to edit it with vi PLEASE let me know how you did it. | I am getting rather sick of the totally unfounded and obviously uninformed | comments of quite a few different individuals on Sandy's XBBS system. Most | downside comments I've seen here so far prove that the individuals making | the comments have never actually installed/operated/managed an XBBS system. Good hit 'n'instead of 'f', then. If I'm one of the individuals you mean, I've been running XBBS for months now (since before Christmas) and I agreed with a few of the original remarks, and still do. | I also take exception to the 'low-performance application' comment. XBBS is | a very efficient, fast, responsive system that hides system load well. Users | of the XBBS system note very little response degradation on a heavily loaded | system, much less than a shell user on the same system. Excuse me? I didn't say anything for or against the performance, but if you look at the accounting files for XBBS, it does use quite a bit of memory, CPU, and forks. I'm not sure anyone really said anything bad about it, but I think calling it efficient and fast is pushing the issue (as it calling it a pig). Let's look at some usage figures from the last few days... procname UID u-cpu s-cpu realtime avg-K line iochar ioblk ends bbsc1 xbbs 15.1 80.4 531.84 129.8 tty2A 313984 215 14:22:05 bbsc1 xbbs 3.3 27.0 233.12 144.2 tty2A 77376 85 22:10:34 bbsc1 xbbs 4.1 30.1 216.32 129.6 tty2A 67712 32 23:21:58 procname UID u-cpu s-cpu realtime avg-K line iochar ioblk ends bbsc1 xbbs 2.0 15.6 129.42 137.2 tty2A 49456 79 8:19:00 bbsc1 xbbs 3.3 25.8 259.04 127.1 tty2A 51208 91 12:05:47 bbsc1 xbbs 3.9 36.1 294.72 131.4 tty2A 116032 66 12:49:10 bbsc1 xbbs 8.7 73.7 1004.16 131.6 tty2A 181760 111 13:29:11 bbsc1 xbbs 2.3 23.6 352.00 140.8 tty1A 65376 86 13:39:12 bbsc1 xbbs 1.9 13.4 168.96 154.4 tty2A 53928 37 13:59:08 Note that the CPU is about 10% of the real time, and that the system time is a lot higher than the user time. This is a moderately large program. This is one a 386 system with lots of memory and fast disk. If you extrapolate to a 286 I can see that the performance might be a bit sluggish. On a loaded machine it might be pretty bad. All of these figures are from times when the load average was <0.3, so they represent mostly load from XBBS. Let's stop this "is too" "is not" stuff. I think a number of people will thell you that Sandy has not been responsive even to the point of responding to fixes for existing bugs. I said before that's his privilege, but don't expect support. The quality of the code is not debateable, let anyone who cares pull the latest version and see what they think. Nobody cares in the least about your opinion (or mine, the original poster's, or Sandy's for that matter). I think both XBBS and UNaXcess represent sharing of a great deal of work with the public, and both should be taken as "unsupported." Since I offer both of them, I have some perspective on the comparisons, and I agree that XBBS is quite hard to maintain, both in the code sense and the sense of day to day system operation. It's comparable to some DOS based systems in that respect, requiring renumbering messages, etc. -- bill davidsen (wedu@ge-crd.arpa) {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me