Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/5/84; site myrias.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcsri!ubc-vision!alberta!myrias!dab From: dab@myrias.UUCP (Danny Boulet) Newsgroups: net.micro.trs-80 Subject: Re: 16/6000 C Message-ID: <234@myrias.UUCP> Date: Tue, 8-Apr-86 05:40:03 EST Article-I.D.: myrias.234 Posted: Tue Apr 8 05:40:03 1986 Date-Received: Tue, 8-Apr-86 13:46:07 EST References: <4593@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU> <> <10@lmi-angel.UUCP> Organization: Myrias Research, Edmonton Lines: 25 >Well, I can't talk for Xenix 3.0, but 2.3 (V7) works just fine with 512K. I >guess I have different expectations of a $3500 machine. The real performance >break seems to come between 256K (thrash city) and 512K. I do notice a >substantial degradation of performance if a lot of jobs start up (UUCP, for >example, when it is spawned by uux). Things have recently gotten better, now >that I have /usr and / on different drives, with / sharing with swap. Using 1.3.5 (based on V7 UNIX), I found that the system would swap out my vi task once a minute whenever cron woke up to check crontab. I found this to be sufficiently annoying that I felt that I had to have more memory (if cron actually did anything useful then the pause could be as long as 10 or 20 seconds). Note that in addition to the standard XENIX background processes, I always have an extra background task running (it's a fairly crude but effective screen saver program that wakes up once an hour to see if /dev/console has been idle for the past hour. If so it clears the screen to avoid burn-in if I forget to turn down the brightness). Also, if I recall correctly, 1.3.5 XENIX uses up more memory for the kernel and such than any of the 1.2.x versions. -Danny P.S. It cost me only $167 Canadian to add the extra 512K of memory myself. I would have probably lived with the pauses if I'd had to pay the $1,250 (Can) that Radio Shack wanted at the time (the price is now down to around $500 (Can) but that is STILL pretty expensive).