*BSD News Article 8803


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!metro!ipso!runxtsa!bde
From: bde@runx.oz.au (Bruce Evans)
Subject: Re: Occasional system hangs
Message-ID: <1992Dec12.223932.15096@runx.oz.au>
Organization: RUNX Un*x Timeshare.  Sydney, Australia.
References: <andrewh.724059111@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au> <jason.724071780@sorokin> <1992Dec12.073053.2721@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 92 22:39:32 GMT
Lines: 17

In article <1992Dec12.073053.2721@fcom.cc.utah.edu> terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:

>RAM isn't a problem; I have run a sufficiently stripped kernel on a 640K
>(no extended or expanded memory!) 386 Box with an NE2K card for periods
>in excess of 4 days with moderate usage (20 Meg swap on a 30 Meg drive
>and /usr remote mounted).  Moderate usage is 3 users curious about it and
>beating on the compiler.  Obviously, no X  8-).

How fast does it run?  I have run a fairly large kernel on a 386 system with
1664K.  It runs OK until it starts swapping.  (Actually it runs dismally
because the disks are slow MFM 2:1 interleave and the system has to go to the
disk for almost everything.)  When it starts swapping, the disk light stays
on all the time and it takes several minutes to run the shell script
'umount -af; sync'.  The shell is bash (definitely too big).  All known
patches related to memory leaks and disk activity are installed.
-- 
Bruce Evans  (bde@runx.oz.au)