[comp.sys.apollo] Apollo OS

hanyak@garnet.bucknell.EDU ("M.E. Hanyak") (05/03/89)

      Does anyone have any insight to the following problem?

      Two years ago, Apollo indicated that SR 10.0 would
      require a workstation with at least 4 MB of memory
      to maintain system performance.  We replace almost
      all of our DN320's with DN3000's and 4000's that
      have 4 MB.

      Today, Apollo reps are saying that minimum memory
      is 8 MB, to maintain system performance.

      Is this a sales ploy?  If not, what inherently is
      causing the problem?  Is this something that all
      UNIX-type workstations are experiencing?

      Thanks in advanced.

Michael E. Hanyak, Jr.           HANYAK@APOLLO.BUCKNELL.EDU
Chem. Engr. Dept.
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, PA  17837

jec@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (James E. Conley) (05/03/89)

	The problem is that small compact programs under SR9.7 now take
massive amounts of space under SR10.  The rlogin that I am running, for
instance, is eating up a whopping 1.8 Mbytes of space, a csh takes 1/2
a megabyte, and the X server eats a healthy 3.3 Mbytes!

	As you can probably guess, this hurts performance when you have
only 4 megabytes in your machine-- something has to go and that means a
lot of paging to disk.

	Apollo knows that this is unaccaptable and have been saying that
they are going to get the execution sizes down to a reasonable level some
time around 10.2 or so.

	As far as needing 8Mbytes, I would say it depends on how you are
using your machines-- most of our users can survive with 4Mbytes at SR10.1,
but for people using them for things other than X terminals the 8Mbytes is
pretty essential.  This is especially true for our CAD users.

	Hope this answers some of your questions.


James Conley
Indiana University Computer Science
jec@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu