Subject: changes to systat io/vm displays?
To: None <tech-userlevel@netbsd.org>
From: Thor Lancelot Simon <tls@rek.tjls.com>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 05/24/2003 13:25:21
Between 1.6 and now, there seem to have been some major changes to the
vm and io displays in systat.  Some are good, some are bad.  I have a
few minor quibbles, however:

1) In the process of making these changes, the vm screen somehow got
   broken so that it does not reliably restore the terminal mode when
   the program is suspended or exited.  This is extremely annoying
   since it makes it difficult to keep a systat vmstat going in the
   background ready for use while doing other work in a shell on
   the same tty.

2) The "scaling" change to the io screen is clever in that it makes
   the visual meaning of the bars more clear, but not so clever in that
   it removes the precise numerical value from the display completely.

   In fact, if I/O throughput is hovering near a power of 10 and the
   update interval is set to the minimum 1 second, it can become
   impossible to read the base, read the exponent, and multiply them
   together quickly enough to actually understand what the throughput
   number was before the data are replaced on the screen.  Not good.

What do others think of these changes?

-- 
 Thor Lancelot Simon	                                      tls@rek.tjls.com
   But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the names of common
 objects that he could think of, and had screamed: "You lamp!  You towel!  You
 plate!" and so on.              --Sigmund Freud