Performance of 80486 based machines running Unix

[Rick Farris]

In article <1991Jun23.051631.20763 at jwt.UUCP> john at jwt.UUCP (John Temples) writes:

> I had my first close encounter with Motif last week, and
> was appalled to see one xterm and one Motif demo start an
> 8 meg system swapping.

It gets better.  I upgraded my system to 16 MB, and with a
normal complement of clients (2 scoterms, zmail, poste, 3
xloads, xbiff and xclock) sar shows the following:

/usr/rfarris> sar -r 1

placid placid 3.2 2 i386    06/23/91

13:25:44 freemem freeswp
13:25:45     180   40000


Yup, 16 MB of memory and I'm only 700k away from paging.
Exclaim or Frame (with it's 2.6 MB kernel) immediately push
the system into page-land.

This is with the stock ODT 1.1 kernel; I didn't increase
kernel resources when I added memory.

The good news is that memory is only ~$44/MB.  I paid $700
for the entire 16 MB.

--
Rick Farris  RF Engineering POB M Del Mar, CA 92014  voice (619) 259-6793
rfarris at rfengr.com     ...!ucsd!serene!rfarris      serenity bbs 259-7757