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

[David Froble]

Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> 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.

Sometimes I can go for days without any changes.  Not saying everyone 
does so little.  Every day a full image backup of the disks are 
performed.  There is little for me to lose, and, I've never lost any 
data.  If it's something important, it will be on multiple systems when 
I'm done.

>> 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.

Not using Fortran, so this is not a problem for me.  I can see why you 
use newer HW.  But, it's not because of speed in this case.

> 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.

I have nothing that would run for such long periods of time.  Frankly, 
if you do such, then newer HW, s Steve has suggested, numerous times, 
seems called for.

>> My VAX runs Adventure quite well, but I've just lost another disk drive.
> 
> Then set up HBVS!
> 

But, I haven't lost any data.  I'll just copy the disk stuff to another 
disk, plug it in, and be back up and running.  I don't consider mission 
a few days of ADVENTURE as any hardship ...

:-)