levy.RDES@XEROX.COM (09/10/86)
Does anyone out there know how the swapper is supposed to work? Specifically, if it has to choose between swapping a process that has been in HIB for less than "LONGWAIT", or a process that has been in LEF for more than "LONGWAIT", which is it supposed to choose? The documentation for the swapper is long on generalizations but short on specifics. My site has a 785 used by 30-35 people, a few of whom like to login first thing in the morning, invoke Datatrieve, then ignore the VAX for the rest of the day. My response is to keep the balance set count low (38) and set LONGWAIT to 5 minutes, forcing the swapper to swap out inactive interactive processes to free the memory for others. This worked reasonably well under VMS V4.0-V4.3, but under VMS V4.4 "busy" hibernating processes such as the job controller are repeatedly swapped in and out (sometimes many times per minute), while inactive processes in the LEF state remain memory-resident. Note that while my impression is that this change occurred when we upgraded to V4.4, I have not gone back and reinstalled V4.3 to verify the problem was not caused by some other change that occurred at about the same time. As a related question, is there any supported way to disable process-swapping for the job controller. (I don't want to modify STARTUP.COM.) Any information on this subject would be appreciated. B. Levy / Versatec
carl@CITHEX.CALTECH.EDU (09/14/86)
The following code, placed early in SYS$MANAGER:SYSTARTUP.COM, should cause job_control to run with swapping disabled, without altering any of the files DEC claims you shouldn't. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ $ stop JOB_CONTROL $ run :== run/noswap $ @sys$system:startup jobctl $ delete/symbol/global run