swapping nightmares

[surfer]

'lo,
     I'm a realatively new SGI/SYS V user, so this is a rather basid
performance question.  

On our 4D/340VGX, we run a mixture of applications, but the main two
types are visualization (of large datasets) programs and scientific
computation (generating those large datasets) progams.  Most of the
time we get  great performance from our machine; but on ocassion,
things go nightmarishly slow.

The symptoms (as I've observed them) are: 
     a) MASSIVE amount of swapping-- osview shows over 70% swap wait and
     large numbers of bytes being swapped in and out.

     b) no process uses over 20-30% of any cpu for very long (even though
     several processes might be running which would normally be running
     constantly at 80%) 

     c) <I think> usage of physical memory is nearing 100% (we have 64Mb)

     d) response time to user inputs on our visualization software becomes
     quite poor (normally quite good)


This may have already been discussed, but it's really causing me major
headaches and I'd like to find out how to salvage some performance for
user interaction on the console (and unfortunately, I'm already
RTFM'ing quite a few other problems for other things).


If you can, please send email copies of your posts to the address
shown below.  Thanks for all the help.



--
Appearing again:
-John West-                        elvis at athena.ee.msstate.edu
Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation
Mississippi State University ***** National Science Foundation
P.O. Drawer EE  {Simrall Bldg, Rm 431}  (601) 325-8234 (voice)
Mississippi State, MS 39762             (601) 325-2298   (fax)
.........the opinions presented here are those of the King..........