58n0

[Alan's Home for Wayward Notes File.]

In article <1990Oct1.080535.17017 at ircam.ircam.fr>, mf at ircam.ircam.fr (Michel Fingerhut) writes:
> To Alan Rollow (alan at shodha.enet.dec.com): you miss the point.  One
> would assume that DEC would have checked Ultrix 4.0 on 58n0 (n>1)
> *before* shipping it out, and would have realized that such commands as
> "ls" take several *seconds* for small directories.  This is IMMEDIATELY
> noticeable.  One would also have assumed that if a problem had been
> found then, it would have appeared either in the release notes, or in
> mandatory patches, or in a special page added to the release (as
> sometimes happens).
> 

	Actually I do get the point.  You mention two possible
	variations of the problem:

	1.  We didn't test the configuration.

	2.  We knew about the problem and shipped V4.0 anyway.

	I propose a 3rd.  The problem doesn't occur on all systems
	and didn't occur on the systems we tested.  Now I don't know
	exactly how our engineering group does their testing, but I
	KNOW that the DECsystem 5810, 5820, 5830 and 5840 were all
	tested.  Furthemore, I've heard from people I trust that 5840's 
	used internally aren't having the problem.

	So, please provide us with as information as possible to
	help us solve the problem.  The official reporting channel
	for this things is an SPR.  As you're aware you can submit
	them through the CSC or mail one of the stupid zillion carbon
	things to the address listed on it (*).

	The sorts of things we need to know.  

	    o   Characterization of your work load.  

		All interactive users?  Doing what?  NFS server?
		How many clients?  Diskless workstation server?
		How many clients?  What sort of workload on the
		clients?  Local or remote paging?

	    o   Configuration.  How much memory?  Which Ethernet
		controller?  Disk controllers?  Disks?  What version
		of ULTRIX installed?  Is the Mandatory patch installed
		and has the kernel been rebuilt (Rev. 179)?  If the
		disks are connected via an HSC what version of HSC
		code?

	    o   Load information.  Collect what you can from iostat
		vmstat, netstat and cpustat.  Or if you can get a
		the sources for Monitor V1.3 now available on gatekeeper-
		.dec.com in pub/DEC/monitor_v4src.tar.Z.

	(*) My personal opinion is that we should allow submitting SPRs 
	via e-mail, but I'm only a system manager in the back waters 
	of Colorado Springs.  Who's going to listen to me?

-- 
Alan Rollow				alan at nabeth.enet.dec.com