john@spirit.UUCP (John F. Godfrey) (12/01/89)
I recently hooked up a Visentech VS-230 directly to port tty000 on my 3b1. My machine has 3.5 mb of memory (2 on the main board, 1.5 on an expansion card) and a 67mb hard drive (ST 4096). My question: is it normal to experience a real loss in normal speed at either the console or the terminal? While I was trying to do some real work :-) my wife was playing mahjongg and we both noticed quite a drop in performance. As with my Trailblazer, would the terminal be better off on the expansion tty that I have left? viz. tty002? Does it matter what type of terminal I say that I am? I respond at login to being either vt-100, dt80, or s4. I am logging in at 9600 baud. Any suggestions, comments, etc. to help this situation would be appreciated. Thanks, John -- John F. Godfrey, Pastor "Jesus said to him, 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father except through Me'" (John 14:6). PHONE: 1-(616)-896-8309 NET ADDRESS: john@spirit.UUCP ..sharkey!spirit!john ATTMAIL: attmail!spirit!john US DOMAIN spirit.grle.mi.us
gil@limbic.UUCP (Gil Kloepfer Jr.) (12/03/89)
In article <105@spirit.UUCP> john@spirit.UUCP (John F. Godfrey) writes: >My question: is it normal to experience a real loss in normal speed >at either the console or the terminal? While I was trying to do some >real work :-) my wife was playing mahjongg and we both noticed quite a >drop in performance. Yes....if you were using the terminal and your wife was playing mahjongg on the console... Since the window stuff is a driver and runs at kernel level, at least as far as I can see, it doesn't experience the same time-slicing that normal user processes experience. When things are being displayed on the console, everything on the machine stops while the character bitmaps are being encoded and placed on the display. An interesting experiment is to start a UUCP transfer with a telebit, and watch the lights. Then cat /etc/termcap on the console. The lights will stop blinkin' and so will disk activity and everything else. > As with my Trailblazer, would the terminal be >better off on the expansion tty that I have left? viz. tty002? I heard yes. The internal (tty000) port code is less efficient (according to some inside information) than the code for the expansion ports. > Does it matter what type of terminal I say that I am? I respond at login >to being either vt-100, dt80, or s4. I am logging in at 9600 baud. Terminal type doesn't matter...it only tells certain programs which do screen functions what escape sequences to send to your terminal. >Any suggestions, comments, etc. to help this situation would be >appreciated. Don't use the console display :-) Seriously though, the solution would be to NOT produce massive output on the console while you were using the terminal or modem. If you replaced the console driver with a user-mode process that wrote to video memory directly (a la Brian Botton's vidpal board), there would be less impact on the system as a whole when the console was used, but in turn the console would be cryingly slow when there was a CPU-intensive process running. Hope this helps! ------ | Gil Kloepfer, Jr. | ICUS Software Systems/Bowne Management Systems (depending on where I am) | ...ames!limbic!gil
jcm@mtunb.ATT.COM (John McMillan) (12/05/89)
In article <584@limbic.UUCP> gil@limbic.UUCP (Gil Kloepfer Jr.) writes: >In article <105@spirit.UUCP> john@spirit.UUCP (John F. Godfrey) writes: : >> As with my Trailblazer, would the terminal be >>better off on the expansion tty that I have left? viz. tty002? > >I heard yes. The internal (tty000) port code is less efficient (according >to some inside information) than the code for the expansion ports. ? Huh? Wha? Not that I know of. Gosh... 'hope I'd know! Anyway, the solitary disadvantage of the tty000 is that it interrupts at SPL4 while the expansion ports interrupt at SPL5. By the time that becomes significant, your barrel's over the falls anyway. (Tty000 should be trivially MORE efficient than the expansion tty's for which a BOARD search must be made.) john mcmillan -- att!mtunb!jcm