Re: Symbolics & Sun-3 + Lucid Dev Envs

[Barry Margolin <barmar@think.com>]

    Date: Fri, 5 Jun 87 12:39 EDT
    From: 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.

Here are some concrete numbers for Thinking Machines lispms.  The
following is a sorted list of (day hour) pairs for the 45 lispms that
were up when I did my survey a few hours ago.

((0 0) (0 1) (0 2) (0 2) (0 3) (0 3) (0 4) (0 5) (0 6) (0 6) (0 6) (0 7) (0 8) (0 15) (0 15)
 (0 19) (0 21) (0 21) (0 22) (1 2) (1 2) (1 3) (1 4) (1 6) (1 7) (1 21) (2 0) (2 2) (2 2) (2 6)
 (2 18) (3 1) (3 4) (3 5) (3 8) (4 4) (4 7) (5 5) (8 4) (8 23) (8 23) (15 1) (16 17) (18 0)
 (25 6))

The mean uptime is about 3-1/2 days.  However, more than half are under
two days.  The machines that have been up over a week are probably not
being used by programmers; several of our machines are used in our
manufacturing lab, and they rarely need to be booted.

Another reason that we reboot frequently is that some machines have
several useful world loads.

						barmar