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[cak at Purdue.ARPA]

From:  Christopher A Kent <cak at Purdue.ARPA>

Yes, our response was the same. Our original VAX was usually swamped
with about 30 people, 6 or 7 of them with troffs running in background,
all getting nowhere. Bob Brown wrote a general job serializer, with
multiple classes, organized so at most one job in each class is
running. We currently have three troff input queues -- normal, big, and
huge. Huge only run at night. Jobs are placed in the appropriate queue
by length, and run shortest job first within a queue. So we have two or
three troffs running at time, mean time to output is better, and
everyone is happier.

We also use the serializer for some of our output device spoolers; the
win is that the same queue control commands are used for all these
different services.

I expect that this software could be made available, but don't know the
details.

Cheers,
chris
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