Detlev_Seidel_UNIV_OF_HANOVER%eurokom.ie@cunyvm.cuny.edu (07/13/90)
This afternoon we had a strange thing happening to the clock under Sunview. We had transferred a tarfile via ftp from an ultrix machine and copied it to our tape drive (we needed to get a DECtape to a SUNtape). To verify the writing we just did a "tar vt" and as expected got the listing of the whole content of the tarfile as it was on tape. The tarfile was very big (28Meg) and had a lot of files in it, many of them fairly small. Then somebody clicked the clock icon, I believe, or even nobody did anything. But the clock started rotating at a fairly decent speed. The speed was actually dependent on the output rate of the tar command. When big files were shown little output came to the screen and the speed of the clock got up to 1-2Hz. The date didn't change, by the way. Did anybody ever observe something like this? Detlev Seidel University of Hanover E-mail:detlev_seidel@eurokom.ie.
fbresz@uunet.uu.net (07/14/90)
In article <9782@brazos.Rice.edu> Detlev_Seidel_UNIV_OF_HANOVER%eurokom.ie@cunyvm.cuny.edu writes: >Then somebody clicked the clock icon, I believe, or even nobody did >anything. But the clock started rotating at a fairly decent speed. The >speed was actually dependent on the output rate of the tar command. When >big files were shown little output came to the screen and the speed of the >clock got up to 1-2Hz. The date didn't change, by the way. Did anybody >ever observe something like this? Sounds like you went into the 'test' feature of the clock. I call this the time warp feature. It just spins the minute hand and moves the hour hand accordingly, if you watch carefully the second hand doesn't move. But anyway you get this by typing a 't' into the clock (usually when it is open but perhaps even when it is closed.) [I do this when I want people to go away. I tell them they have 15 minutes, turn the clock into test and tell them time is up.] As you can imagine doing all of that updating of the screen takes some cpu and you probably noticed a slowdown because when there were a lot of little files the cpu also had to update the screen to have all those file names on it. When there was a big file the i/o system was busy and the cpu could spin the clock really fast.