[SunRescue] Misc. Questions about my Ultra 10

[Christopher Byrne]

Eric,

You are running into two classic UNIX issues, and a fun SunPCI issue. The
first is caused by the way the kernel reports resource allocation and
utilization


Eric Ozrelic
Sent: Monday, December 04, 2000 02:27

>1. Using top, I notice that usually when I reach my cruising altitude with
>application usage.. i.e I have everything open that I need, and am working,
>my physical memory is at about 4MB free, and my swap has around 350MB free.
>Is this normal? Do I have a memory leak?

In actuality top doesn't report on the resources used, but the resources
allocated for use. Many programs will reserve a large chunk of memory that
they may or may not use. This chunk will be shown as used in utilities like
top. Also It is appropriate behavior for your system to use almost all of
it's physical RAM before it starts paging out significantly, since RAM is so
much faster than swap.

The second issue, about  the Sun PCI is once again a matter of resource
allocation.

>2. I use a SunPCi card and notice that as soon as I start using it, it
sucks
>up a TON of my memory, even though I have 256MB of memory onboard the card.
What gives?
>I'm running the newest SunPCI software.

The way the kernel handles IO calls and what not for the SunPCI cards is
very memory intensive, especially if you are using shared ethernet and
shared display on the original SunPCI card. The new SunPCI-II is a lot more
efficient, and has it's own  (reasonalby good) display and ethernet
capabilites. Once again the lage amount of memory isn't really in use, it's
been reserved by the kernel to act as a buffer for the SunPCI subsystems I/O
(storage, display etc...)

>One more thing... I have an Elite3D M3 card that I'm using. Looking at the
>specs between the Elite3D M3, and the onboard PGX24, the Elite3D should
have much higher
>2D performance then the onboard graphics....I know I suck but... WHY DON'T
>MY WINDOWS move faster when I drag them around the screen? Shouldn't my 2D
>performance on my desktop in X be blazing fast? It doesn't seem any faster
>then the PGX24. I've applied all the Elite patches I could get ahold of.
>Coming from Windows/BeOS, I'd like to move my windows around with out
things
>stuttering.


The third issue of windows stuttering when you move them is inherent to most
implementations of X windows. The fact of the matter is that X really doesnt
make good use of the low level capabilites of the hardware it runs on
without a lot of special tweaking. For example in my Linux box I have a
GeForce 2 256, which has it's own X server written just for that card, and
the 2D performance is still just plain lousy. The same applies for my U170E
with Creator.

On my SGI machines X is very smooth however. In fact I'd say it's better
than either Win32 or Macintosh windowing. Why? Because SGI knows that it's
target market really cares about X-Windows performance and has optimized
their hardware and software for that purpose. On the other hand, I'd bet
that better than half of all the current Sun systems out there are probably
run headless or in text mode most of the time, so Sun hasn't put much effort
into X-Windows performance, unless you get a major league CAD package or
something similar, in which case it will have special extensions or even an
entirely new X-server to run.


Chris Byrne
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