[rescue] sparc10 cpu - what to do.

[Dave McGuire]

On 12/17/2016 11:00 AM, Sandwich Maker wrote:
> now that my memory is prodded, i have a little sunos kernel tuner shell
> script i wrote according to an old sun performance overview article.
> sunos came out when memory was expensive and most machines had what
> we'd consider really tiny amounts of ram; only really bulky machines
> like db servers et al had anything like what we'd consider normal now.

  I dunno about that, man.  I'd consider 32GB-64GB to be normal now, and
the last big Oracle server that I ran under SunOS was on an SS20 with, I
think, 384MB of RAM, in about 1996. ;)

> the sunos kernel was optimized for memory in the single-digits of MB.
> the script calculates and resets several variables in either kmem,
> vmunix, or both.  it can be run on a running machine.  i don't know if
> you'll get a perceptible, or even measurable, speedup.

  Most of these are calculated from the kernel build tunable MAXUSERS,
usually right near the top of a BSD kernel configuration file.  That
variable set the sizes of a great many things in a kernel built from
that config file.  I think most of those tunables you're talking about
are the runtime-settable subset of those, and yes, they can have a
profound and visible impact on overall system performance.

> i also have a ksh function which assists in calculating disk partition
> tables for the cylinder-boundary metaphor, still needed as late as s8
> but really obsolete in the zbr era.  have late-model solarii given up 
> on it yet?
> 
> anyone interested in them?

  I'm interested.  The new exhibit floor is going to have a lot of early
Sun hardware running, and the majority of it will be running SunOS.

              -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA