CPU/MEMORY/MATH-CO

[Wei Jen Yeh]

Hello,
  I believe somebody must have been in the same situation -- How to upgrade
your system?

  This is my situation.  I'm running Dell's 4.0 on a 386-20.  It has 8mb of
memory, and does not have cache or a 387.  I usually work under X and have
three to four xterms opened.  The system gets REALLY SLOW when a compilation
is taking place.  It gets even worse when lisp is running.  You can count the
characters when they are displayed on the screen!  So, the question is,
how do I upgrade my system?  A faster machine, more memory, or a math-co?
I understand that 387 will improve the X performance (at leaset for Dell's
stock X11R4). (That brings up another question.  Is Roell's port of X11R4
fast enough w/o a 387?  I heard that Dell is going to release a version of
Roell's X386 for their 4.0)  But which option will give me more improvements?

  A related question is how do I determine the current bottleneck of my
system? How does one read the results from sar, and which values are the
important ones?  Which kernel parameters should I try to modify first?
I appreciate any help/info you can give me.

  The next questions are for people running Dell 4.0 and have used any comm.
program under it.  I use kermit to connect to the computer at school with a
2400 baud modem.  When doing a long cat on the remote host, the local m/c
will split out about 20-30 lines of text with intermittent stops, then the
rest of the output is not displayed.  The connection is still there.  It looks
like the async input buffer was full and the input handler just ignored the
incoming characters without blocking the sender.  Has anyone seen this problem?
BTW, this occured under both X and the ascii console.

  Another question.  A quit (ctrl-C) when executing some programs 
causes ksh to dump core.  A reproducible example is the command
"zcat gcc-1.39.tar | tar tvf -".  ksh prints the messages after ctrl-C is
pressed:
ksh: 24235 Quit(coredump)
ksh: 24234 Quit(coredump)
, where the two integers are pid's.

  I reported both problems to support at dell, but have not gotten any denial or
confirmation of them.

  BTW, I successfully established a 3.2 devp. environment under 4.0 using
gcc.  It's really simple once you figure out how to modify the various
SPEC definitions in the tm-i386*.h file.

  Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions.

Wei Jen Yeh                      yeh at cs.purdue.edu
                                 Department of Computer Science
                                 Purdue University
                                 West Lafayette, Indiana
-- 
Wei Jen Yeh                      yeh at cs.purdue.edu
                                 Department of Computer Science
                                 Purdue University
                                 West Lafayette, Indiana