Return to BSD News archive
Xref: sserve comp.windows.x.i386unix:1564 comp.os.386bsd.questions:2466 Newsgroups: comp.windows.x.i386unix,comp.os.386bsd.questions Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!wupost!uunet!pipex!uknet!gdt!aber!fronta.aber.ac.uk!pcg From: pcg@aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Subject: Re: XFree1-2 + 386BSD performance In-Reply-To: wongm@ipc5.lat.oz.au's message of Wed, 12 May 1993 02: 57:31 GMT Message-ID: <PCG.93May16215315@decb.aber.ac.uk> Sender: news@aber.ac.uk (USENET news service) Nntp-Posting-Host: decb.aber.ac.uk Reply-To: pcg@aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Organization: Prifysgol Cymru, Aberystwyth References: <1993May12.025731.29769@latcs1.lat.oz.au> Date: Sun, 16 May 1993 21:53:15 GMT Lines: 27 >>> On Wed, 12 May 1993 02:57:31 GMT, wongm@ipc5.lat.oz.au (M.C. Wong) said: Wong> Hi, I have a question about the performanc of running XFree1.2 on Wong> 386BSD 0.1. In multi-user mode running 3 xterms, xeyes, xclock, Wong> xload and xbiff, when I do serious compiling in one of the window, Wong> I realize that the performance of the overall X activities are Wong> intolerable slow and it chokes very very much, and I can hardly Wong> see my mouse moving/appearing on the screen for 5-10 seconds. Easy: GCC (which is what you will be using under 386bsd) can generate *immense* (dozens of megabytes) temporary tables. It can easily crowd out everything of a 16MB machine. Even if it does not, if it gets large enough (a few MB will be enough, and it is very easy to see GCC grow to a few MB even on rather common programs), it can be swapped out; and if it is swapped, everything will freeze while the system is swapping in/out several MB of memory image. The same effect will happen if it is the X server to be swapped out. As a palliative you can avoid running xeyes, xclock, xload and xbiff, this will save you some MB of resident (because they are all continuosly active) memory, and thus minimize the possibility of GCC (or the X server) being swapped out. If you run vmstat in one of your xterms you will see that things are getting swapped out almost surely; I cannot guess whether the X server or the GCC process are getting swapped out/in.