VAX 6460 being slow, IO bottlenecks and SMP woes ...

From: Gunther Schadow <gunther_at_aurora.regenstrief.org>
Date: Wed Mar 20 21:15:12 2002

Brian Hechinger wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 08:41:59PM -0600, Paul Thompson wrote:
>
>>Does your i486 feature long ribbon cable to dual ported IDE drives to
>>support its clustering? If not, perhaps you were paying for features
>>other than speed, ones that Ultrix took less advantage of than VMS.
>>
>
> mmmm. VMS. see, now that is the operating system that is meant to run on
> that machine. match VMS on the 6000 vs BSD/i386 (or whatever) on the 486.
> then you will see the real difference. ;)
>
> and then throw in clustering just to show off exactly what the 486 can't do. :)


Yes, so, let's suppose that ULTRIX didn't take full advantage
of the hardware, but nothing can get me back to using VMS. That's
for sure.

I'm certainly not complaining, just wondering and trying to
understand what exactly it is that made people pay millions
of dollars for a harware that was only a few years later
outpaced by the poor man's desktop ... ... ... now, I don't
know that yet, I actually don't believe it. I still suspect
that once the bottlenecks are uncovered, I can find
workarounds to coerce more of the idle hardware into working.

For instance, calling GNU make with the -j option and
calling gcc with the -pipe option appears to create a
lot more CPU load:

cpu us% ni% sy% id% csw sys trap intr ipi ttyin ttyout
  1 30.3 0.0 6.4 63.2 89k 288k 300k 218k 13 3k 190k
  2 22.4 0.0 1.4 76.2 27k 84k 74k 0 24 481 22k
  3 20.5 0.0 1.4 78.1 28k 80k 70k 0 13 526 17k
  4 23.1 0.0 1.5 75.4 28k 86k 74k 0 25 531 23k
  5 21.2 0.0 1.5 77.3 29k 88k 72k 0 25 550 19k
  6 19.5 0.0 1.5 79.1 29k 86k 73k 0 26 600 25k

that looks better, at least the others are not
97% idle now.

regards,
-Gunther



-- 
Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D.                    gschadow_at_regenstrief.org
Medical Information Scientist      Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
Adjunct Assistant Professor        Indiana University School of Medicine
tel:1(317)630-7960                         http://aurora.regenstrief.org
Received on Wed Mar 20 2002 - 21:15:12 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:35:12 BST