Howdy:

I'm trying to get a handle on a performance issue that has had me baffled for
a while.  We use a HP-3000/987SX (currently on 5.0 soon to go to 5.5) and have
the GLANCE/iX and SOS (Lund Performance) performance measurement tools
installed.  I've identified disk I/O as a possible source of performance
trouble and am looking at other bottlenecks as well.

What's put a burr under my saddle is that GLANCE/iX reports that several
processes are waiting on MEM.  Time to RTFM!!  The GLANCE manual says that MEM
indicates a process is "waiting on a memory swap."  A "glance" at the GLANCE
banner, however, shows that the high-water mark for memory usage is only 56%. 
Why is the system forcing processes to wait on a memory swap when there is
plenty of memory available?  If the memory is available, why swap at all?  Why
not just put the object (file page, data page, etc.) in memory and leave the
durn thing there until it absolutely has to be thrown out to make room for a
new object?  It seems wasteful to have a lot of memory on the system which is
essentially going unused.  The SOS graphs do show a high page fault rate
during peak usage and I feel that this could be avoided if all of memory was
used rather than relying on swapping in and out.

Am I missing something here?  Is there a SYSGEN parameter I can set to tell
the system to "use it if ya got it?"  Any words of wisdom here are most
appreciated!!

Tom Madigan
SE Pennsylvania

"My opinions are strictly my own...Who else would want 'em?"

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