[Info-vax] primary and secondary page and swap files, AUTOGEN, SHOW MEMORY/FILES

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <m81qvj$9di$1 at dont-email.me>, David Froble
<davef at tsoft-inc.com> writes: 

> >>>> I confess to curiosity.  What were you doing on the VAX systems to cause 
> >>>> you to declare them "too slow"?
> >>> Full shadow copies over 5 MB/s SCSI and 10 Mb/s ethernet.  Yes, the 
> >>> 4000/90 was quite fast for a VAX.  Not necessary very often, but when 
> >>> necessary, annoying to wait.
> >> This isn't an application.
> > 
> > No, but it is something which was too slow.
> > 
> >> You give valid reasons, but, "too slow" doesn't seem to be one of the 
> >> reasons.
> > 
> > Have you ever done a 9-GB full shadow copy with 5 MB/s SCSI and 10 Mb/s 
> > ethernet?  It IS too slow.
> 
> No.  I am not using volume shadowing.

How do you sleep?  Seriously, if you care about your data, what will you 
do when a disk fails?  Before I had volume shadowing, I did daily 
backups, but even then in the worst case you lose a day's worth of data, 
have to do the restore etc.

> Not sure if you're aware, but the extra load volume shadowing can put on 
> old disks just might be enough to push them over the edge.

I've never heard of this, nor experienced it.  How is it an extra load 
on the disk?  Apart from (very occasional) shadow full copies, the load 
on a shadowed disk is the same as the load on a non-shadowed disk.  
Actually less, since on average it will have to satisfy just half of the 
READ requests (for a 2-member shadow set; my most important one has 3 
members, so there it is just 1/3).

> What I was thinking is that for a hobbyist, just about any of the later 
> VAXs would handle most applications that a hobbyist (or a software 
> developer) might use.

Well, one can only develop software which runs on VAX.  Any Fortran 
standard after 77 isn't possible.

Also, define hobby.  I used to work in academia.  Now, I work in IT 
(with VMS actually, though I do mostly application support for 
applications written in-house, mostly in conjunction with Rdb---apart 
from DCL, the only overlap is with third-party software like the OSU 
server; at home I also do system management, hardware, etc.) but still 
dabble a bit in my old field of research.  Sometimes I calculate 
something which takes a couple of weeks as a batch job on an EV67.  It 
would be months or years on a VAX, but might not be possible at all due 
to lack of memory.

> My VAX runs Adventure quite well, but I've just lost another disk drive.

Then set up HBVS!