[Info-vax] Running Alpha VMS under the ES40 emulator

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-10-12 17:27, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2013-10-12, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>> On 2013-10-12 15:59, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>>> Johnny Billquist  <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>>>> On 2013-10-12 14:18, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>>> No, the real problem is that Firefox has become a bloated monstrosity. :-)
>>>>> Running top or ps -axl while using Firefox can be very revealing.
>>>>
>>>> That is also a problem, but it's a separate one.
>>>>
>>>> It is very telling when the problem appears "after leaving the machine
>>>> running for the night". That should tell you that something happened
>>>> during the night...
>>>
>>> You mean like some application, like perhaps Firefox or Gnome, with a
>>> memory leak problem has somehow grown in size over the night to the point
>>> where it has allocated too much memory for the system to run properly?
>>>
>>> Remember, you can't say "Irix" without saying "Memory Leak."  Err... I
>>> mean Firefox...
>>
>> While I will not exclude memory leaks from likely problems, that is a
>> problem that should be equally bad daytime, and much worse during active
>> use...
>>
>
> It is and it is.
>
> When I leave Firefox downloading something during the day while I do
> something else and then come back to it a couple or so hours later I also
> encounter some thrashing.

Do I even need to point out that "doing something else" is pretty 
equivalent to the system doing something else...
"Some trashing" essentially just means that pages have been paged out 
and the physical memory have been put to other use by the OS. I would be 
surprised if that did not happen if you do something else on the machine.

> When using Firefox heavily while doing some research, I also encounter
> that same problem after a period of time.

This does not really smell like memory leaks or big bugs, just the 
normal expected behavior. If this is all you get, then it would be 
reasonable for things to be stable over night when the system is not 
touched.

Ah well. I do not feel like arguing over this. I *know* that the nightly 
jobs will push processes out of memory for file cache use.
You can easily simulate it by just (as root) do a "find / -name '*.core' 
-print" twice, and once they have completed, check how responsive your 
web browser is.
And refrain from doing anything else at all while the find is running.

	Enough,
	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol