Sun 3/110 memory problems, VME adaptor cards?

[tim marsland]

We have a Sun 3/110 with 4Mbytes of physical memory on the processor card,
a SCSI disk card, and the ``spare'' slot in the three slot card cage taken
up with a double height transputer interface card riding on a triple
height adaptor.

We're running SunOS 4.0, and as soon as we try and run NeWS 1.1 (a 3.5
binary) with a terminal window or two, the machine slows down to a crawl,
paging for all it is worth.  It gets a lot worse if anyone else is trying
to use the machine.  Similar, though less noticable problems occur with
SunView, and my guess is that the problem is going to get worse not better
with later releases of SunOs and the merged NeWS/X.11 server (some
informed optimist may care to contradict me on this).

Conclusion: we need more physical memory.

After some initial optimistic stories about piggy-back memory cards which
could be patched onto the SCSI card, the Sun sales people here in the UK
now say that we cannot get any supported memory upgrade from Sun
themselves.  Anyhow, I suspect it is probably the most expensive way to do
it anyhow.

My thoughts have been turning to using/making a VME adaptor to give us
extra slots in an external VME rack, but one solution that would be
particularly nice would be a double height to triple height adaptor which
had additional SunOs accessible memory (4M/8M say) *on board* ?

Before we make an adaptor card with memory... (!),
has any one out there heard of/can recommend such a product?

Please post any replies to me and I will summarise to economise on net
bandwidth!

tim marsland,
cambridge university engineering dept.