SparcStation Performance

[Jeremy Cook]

> We've also noticed that the SparcStation becomes quite slow when someone
> is doing nothing more than editing a file on the console (slow to the
> point that vi acts like the load average is up around 10 or so when it is
> actually less than one).

This was one of the first things we noticed when we first received a
SparcStation. If the console user wasn't using X or Suntools then none of
the other users could get any reasonable response out of the machine. We
suspected that this has something to do with the device driver for the
console display. Could it be that the default device driver is very
inefficient but that the time used to access the device does not show up
in a 'ps' ?

-- Jeremy Cook (jeremy at kheops.cmi.no)