How to SPEED UP response time

[ian searle]

Hello, I am a sysadmin by neccesity, taking care of several
workstations and a mini. We run COSMIC NASTRAN on a DECstation 5000/200
sometimes and it is a real CPU/IO hog. We run 3-6 users off of the
DS5000 and when someone runs a moderate-big NASTRAN job the
machine crawls to a halt as far as interactive usage is concerned.
nice'ing, renice'ing the jobs seems to have very little effect.
Can anyone suggest a method for improving interactive response time
at the expense of the background jobs? DECstation stats: 32 meg RAM
graphics board, two disks totalling over 1 giga-byte, UWS 4.1, only
1 X-terminal (the console), and yes we have `fixed' the X-server
so it does not grow to the size of available RAM.

Note: running NASTRAN on the mini is not an option, kicking users
off the DECstation is also not an option, and running NASTRAN only at
night is also not an option. 

Thanks, ian (uw-beaver!sumax!polari!ian)