Subject: Re: VS2000 speed (was RE: A Hobbyist DECnet Network)
From: "John Allain" <allain at panix.com>
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2005 15:23:30 -0500
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>
I remember my uVII (RD54 on QBus, no Windowing) taking about 9 minutes
to boot, and about 15 seconds to do a HELP page. Still worth the wait,
compared to PCDOS certainly.
John A.
I bet if it had 6mb of ram it was alot. Also if "help" was that slow it's
because to save disk space it wasn't unpacked, add to that a lot of
paging and swaping and eek bad. My smaller ba23 uVAXII is only 8mb but,
I gave up the tape for a second disk an RD31. The RD31 was the swap
and page disk as they were fairly fast (16 heads not a lot of cylinders).
That helped a lot and the tuning of the startup helped. Got a lot of
the waiting out. The BA123 has SCSI with two RZ56 and MSCP for RD54
and 53 and that with 16mb of ram is noticeably faster, even with DECwindows
running useing the local hardware it's not bad. One VMS trick I've found
helps is put the page and swap on another spindle, it helps. Even a
netbooted VS2000 with 20mb local for page and swap flies noteably better.
Allison