itty bitty IRIX questions

[Rodian Paul]

Randy Carpenter asked:

> |   2.) Why does ps(1) take so long every once in a while but then
> |       has good response at other times.

Dave Olson answered:

> If you change /unix, or remove /tmp/.ps_data, the file gets re-created,
> which takes a while.  After that ps runs faster.  Basicly it saves ps
> having to grub through the kernel symbol table on each invocation.
> 

Myself and others here have also noticed this problem. We don't dick
with the kernels that often and to my knowledge nobody deliberatly 
trashes /tmp/.ps_data. I'm afraid I don't think that the above 
answer quite explains why the response is often so slow. The odd 
thing is that the response problem doesn't seem tied to the load-average
on the machine.

The machines we've noted this on: 4D/70GT's, 4D/210's, 4D/240GTX's, 4D/25's,
4D/35's and a 4D/380S.

OS: IRIX 3.3.1 and 3.3.2

> |   3.) Why doesn't ex(1) and vi(1) look at the TMPDIR environment
> |       variable like ed(1) to allocate buffers?  The default root
> |       partition on SGI systems doesn't leave enough space in /tmp
> |       to edit huge files.  I don't want to have to worry about
> |       every user having to "set directory=/usr/tmp" in their .exrc
> |       files and I don't want to expand the root partition.
> 

Now for a naive question. I collect a lot of stuff from the net and the
folders that I save via 'rn' often become quite large. At a later date, 
when I try to run:

	% Mail -f ~/News/Comp.foo

on a large file, I get the following response:

	/tmp: No such file or directory

I then have to switch to a machine with a larger root partition. I find
that nowadays I am slicing my news folders and giving them a .n suffix.
Is there a way to specify which directory /usr/sbin/Mail uses for a 
temporary dir? Yep. I'm allready specifying TMPDIR in my env.


Cheers.
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