Tuning SYSVR3 (Esix Rev D) (LONG!)

[John Temples]

In article <1990Dec02.001311.16727 at virtech.uucp> cpcahil at virtech.UUCP (Conor P. Cahill) writes:
>Even if you set this variable to some high value, it is still possible 
>that at that new time period following a large disk update, the system 
>will slow down momentarily due to many dirty pages that still need to 
>be written out, so you may be in a no-win situation.

Is a cached hard disk controller a win in this situation?  If you
flush a bunch of stuff to disk (but not so much as to overflow the
controller's cache), does the system's response still feel "snappy"?
What happens when you give the controller a read request while it's
flushing its cache to the disk -- does the read take priority?  Or
must you wait till the controller finishes?  The only gripe I have
about 386 UNIX is that when you have two or more processes contending
for the disk, the system comes to a near halt.  Will a cached
controller help or eliminate this problem?
-- 
John W. Temples -- john at jwt.UUCP (uunet!jwt!john)