Re: Symbolics & Sun-3 + Lucid Dev Envs

[Cliff Lasser <CAL@think.com>]

    Date: Thu, 4 Jun 87 23:13 EDT
    From: Robert W. Kerns <RWK@yukon.scrc.symbolics.com>

    I'm curious how often customers (that is, all you guys)
    end up booting their (your) machines, and what you boot them for.

Here at Thinking Machines, most lispms are booted at least once a day.
This is because we have more people than machines and most people don't
need a machine for a whole day.  Since users tend to modify the
environment in undoable ways, it is usually necessary to boot before
logging in.  Now, when lispms become sufficiently cheap that we can have
one per technical staff member ...

On occasion a machine will go for a week without booting.

    I guess I'm also curious about how often people end up booting
    Sun's.  That is, booting Lisp on a Sun, I don't care about Unix,
    (or the FEP, which I consider to be about equivalent ;-).

In my experience, usually every few hours.  When doing production runs
(massive compilings or large Connection Machine runs), booting sometimes
happens once a day.  It's not hard to corrupt the environment.  At the
first sign that the environment is corrupt, one doesn't hesitate to
boot.

By the way, booting isn't quite as bad as on a lispm.  To begin with,
we are usually using lisp from inside a gmacs shell, which means we
don't lose any editor buffers.  Also, bin files seem to load quite a bit
quicker in Lucid Lisp.

	-Cliff