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To: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com>
cc: Peter Dufault <dufault@hda.com>, current@freebsd.org,
        freebsd-isp@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: ISP state their FreeBSD concerns 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 12 Nov 1995 10:39:36 PST."
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Date: Sun, 12 Nov 1995 10:59:30 -0800
Message-ID: <16518.816202770@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> On my system at home (486DX4/100, 850MB Western Digital IDE, VLB IDE
> controller, 24MB RAM) the system does seem to freeze up for as much as 5
> seconds when I start up a large process such as Netscape or cause one of
> the existing processes to greatly expand their RAM usage (for example,
> looking through the 1000 messages that sometimes accumulate in my INBOX
> using pine, or loading a large number of pictures into XV).  I think it's

Huh.  Well, all I can say is that this definitely points at IDE
because I can't reproduce it at all, and that includes starting the
most bloated netscape v2.0b1 binaries, systems like KCL and other
notorious memory hogs.  I also know that our IDE driver isn't exactly
likely to win land records for speed - it's one of those icky parts of
the system that nobody really wanted to work on once it got to a state
where it was fairly bulletproof.

I also agree with Jake - if there's an ISP using IDE CDROM drives out
there for anything then they should donate those drives to charity
just as fast as they can rip them out of the machines and buy SCSI
drives.  I was helping an ISP recently who had several machines that I
was horrified to learn had IDE drives in them.  The systems were not
performing very well under heavy load, and he called me in to try and
figure out why.  The very first thing I did was threaten to come back
with a ball peen hammer and do extreme violence to any IDE drives I
found lurking in any machines on the premises, and he hastily yanked
them out (I'm not sure he knew whether or not I was joking, and
frankly neither did I :-).  Since then, his systems have been just
champing along.  He's very happy.

					Jordan