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From: j@bonnie.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Suggestion for 2.1
Date: 21 Jun 1995 12:00:07 +0200
Organization: Private U**x site, Dresden.
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Message-ID: <3s8qj7$meh@bonnie.tcd-dresden.de>
References: <3r7888$280@germany.eu.net> <3s0ils$7i9@multivac.orthanc.com> <3s3o6h$5k0@bonnie.tcd-dresden.de> <3s7h66$j4l@iii1.iii.net>
Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de
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HD Associates <hdslip@iii1.iii.net> wrote:
>>This all aside, a mediad that wakes up every 5 or 10 seconds is
>>actually a waste of resources. (Rank #2 after the idea to wake up
>>`adjkerntz' every second in order to look for a DST changeover. -)
>>SGI is used to waste resources, we aren't.
>
>Well, polling in the driver every 5 seconds isn't THAT much overhead.
>'mediad' would block until the driver continued it. What would drive
>me crazy is the way my "disk light" (which is actually a SCSI
>activity light) would keep flashing every 5 seconds.
It's not a CPU time hog, Peter, but a memory hog. Waking up every 5
or 10 seconds prevents a daemon from being swapped. Have a few of
those nifty daemons, and you'll eat up 2 Meg of your valuable RAM.
(There are things like cron, init and syslogd blocking some physical
RAM.) Btw., nifty daemons like this are one of they reasons why an
SGI box with only 16 Meg of RAM is just an expensive piece of crap.
Remember, we still ship a system that's practically useful (for
certain tasks) even with only 4 or 5 Meg RAM.
--
cheers, J"org private: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de
http://www.sax.de/~joerg/
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)