butterwo@sneezy.cs.unc.edu (Jeff Butterworth) (03/01/90)
I'm helping with a project that uses a sun4 280 to communicate with some external devices, one of which is a video digitizer. An upcoming use of this system will require grabbing video images in real time. Unfortunately, the amount of data per image is about 100Kb. This means that after a little while, huge pieces of memory will begin to be swapped to disk, thus slowing down the machine. This slowdown will ruin our real time goal. So far, I have two ideas about how to keep the video frame grabbing going as fast as possible. (1) Keep all other users off of the machine during the experiment. I know that this seems a little rude, but the machine is primarily used just for this experiment. I've talked to the local system administrator and he assured me that this is easy to do. (2) Somehow tell the operating system not to swap certain blocks of memory out to disk. My problem is that I don't know how to do this but have heard rumors that it is possible. Does anyone out there know how to do this?