UNIX 4.2 thrashing - the cause? too little memory.

[William L. Sebok]

Before this discussion gets any farther I would like to say that I don't believe
that the problem the original poster had was due to a badly set up file system.
I believe that their problem was too little memory.  Correspondence with the
poster revealed that they were running with 2 Mb which I believe is far too
little for 4.2 BSD to operate properly on a Vax with any decent number of users.

Originally we also had 2 Mb of memory.  Now we have 6.5 Mb.  The thrashing
was one of the first things I discovered when I brought up 4.2 BSD here. I was
almost lynched for bringing it up. It needed much more memory to operate
comfortably than 4.1 BSD did.  The problem went away when we purchased the
additional memory.
-- 
Bill Sebok			Princeton University, Astrophysics
{allegra,akgua,burl,cbosgd,decvax,ihnp4,noao,princeton,vax135}!astrovax!wls