Conflict between printer queue and file system backups

[barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)]

    Date: Wed, 18 Jul 90 12:42 CDT
    From: lgm@iexist.att.com

    Our site homes both our Postscript printer and our major, backed-up
    filesystem on the same machine.  (Screen dumps drag down a Lisp machine
    considerably, and we cannot spare an entire machine simply for running
    the printer.)  Unfortunately, a screen dump during a filesystem backup
    forces the machine into the FEP.  (Thankfully, a simple Continue
    suffices to get the machine going again.)  Our system administrator
    cannot always babysit the machine throughout an entire backup.  Is this
    printer/backup interference fixed in Genera 8.0 (we are still running
    7.2 at the moment)?  If not, does anyone have a solution, other than the
    obvious one of prohibiting screen dumps (or even disabling the printer
    queue) during a backup?

I find this all very surprising, but maybe that's because we don't have
any printers connected to our Lispms.  I don't understand why the Lispm
would care that a file being sent to the printer contains a screen dump.
It's just a Postscript file.  The only relationship between the spooler
and the backup software is that they both access the LMFS, and screen
dumps tend to be large files.  Another possibility is interference at
the microcode level between the serial port and the disk interface (what
model Lispm is it?).

Does a screendump during a backup always send the machine into the FEP,
or only sometimes?  Have you gone into the FEP debugger to see where
it's dying?  If not, but this was the most recent crash of the file
server, could you send me the output of Show Crash Data so I can see
where it crashed?

                                                barmar