Newcomer's questions

[John McMillan]

In article <1990Feb22.085859.21111 at cs.UAlberta.CA> adam at pembina.UUCP (Michel Adam) writes:
>
>On page 1 of INTRO(4) in the UNIX 3.51 Utilities User's Manual
>vol. II it is stated that a file on the UNIXpc cannot be larger
>than 1 megabyte in size.
:
	This restriction was aborted: don't know if ANY release
	went out with it.  ULIMIT restrictions are common, but
	most of us argued that it made little sense on a
	[typically] single-user system.

:
>Finally, I noticed that usage of the Floppydisc system in 'UA'
>slows down a communication (async_main) considerably. Is this
>something that can be fine tuned? Is there combination of
>actions to avoid on this machine ?
:
	The Floppy disk shares the DMA circuits with the Hard Disk.
	Therefore it will considerably slow down any HD accesses.

	If you have little RAM, this will slow your paging-in/-out.
	There may be considerable paging during async_main's
	start-up, even if you have lots of RAM.  [_I_ don't use a_m.]

	I wouldn't expect much [any?] CPU burden from the Floppy
	activities that wasn't obvious [eg: compress ... > /dev/rfp021.]

john mcmillan -- att!mtune!jcm -- muttering for self, not THEM