> Date: Fri, 6 Oct 1995 20:59:33 +0100
> From: Julian Bean <jelibean@jmlbhome.demon.co.uk>

[ performance issues...]

> I got my Sun3 booting off SCSI yesterday evening, and played with it
> extensively today.  It is S...L..O..W...
> 
> Like in X, for example, it takes seconds for the machine to notice a cursor
> movement.  Typing a key causes disk access, and although when that
> eventually stops the xterminal is quite adequate, actually running anything
> causes another disk thrash (even 'ps').  I am guessing that this is
> swapfile access mainly (I have 16M swap on the disk), and that it is slow
> because of the oft-lamented SCSI driver.Is this right?  Will the
> much-heralded new SCSI driver solve the problem and speed the machine up?

If the machine is swapping that often, then you need more memory.
The current (slow) SCSI driver really exacerbates this problem...

Let me guess:  Does machine have only 4M of RAM?

If you can't get it more RAM, you might want to consider running
only the Xserver there (via xdm) and run almost everything else
on some other machine. (hopefully one with lots more memory!)

Gordon