RE: SPARC Mach paging performance.

[rashid@microsoft.com]

Rob,
    Just looking at your statistics, it seems pretty obvious that your problem is
paging driven and almost certainly the result of having something like 6 MB of 
memory wired down.  If I had to venture a guess without knowing the specifics of
your machine configuration, I'd have to guess that the machine specific decision
about the size of the buffer cache was just wrong for the Sparc.  I would configure
the system with a minimal buffer cache (say 128 buffers or 1/2 MB) and look again
at the vm_stat.  If that has improved dramatically, then that certainly was the
problem.  If not, it may be that there is some wierd data structure generated for
the Sparc which is not used in other implementations. Steve would know.

    BTW, it would be helpful to Steve & the Mach group if you had comparable
paging statistics for the SunOS system.  My guess is that the main difference
will be seen in default configuration parameters which result in less paging
activity, but it is worth finding out for certain and ferreting out any problem
which might exist.

-Rick

PS - MERRY CHRISTMAS!