🚀 go-pugleaf

here at the UNM computing center, as part of our accounting/capacity
statistics stream, we run a "quot(8)" command every day on all
file systems on all machines to determine disk space usage for all the
users on our systems. we have noticed a problem. on our Sequent
the quot command takes *forever* to run, while on all our other
machines it finishes in a short while. here are some sample figures
from yesterday:

on a Vax 11/785, running 4.3bsd the quot took:

	169.8 cpu seconds (user + system) for 1063 MBytes in 18
		file systems, all on Fujitsu Eagles (takes less
		than 20 minutes in wallclock time to run).

on a Sequent S27, 6 processors, running Dynix 3.0.12 the quot took:

	46754.6 cpu seconds (user + system) for 800 MBytes in 11
		file systems, all on Fujitsu Eagles & Swallows
		(takes almost a full day in wallclock time to run).

this has been going on for a while now.

the file systems are not any fuller (and therefore perhaps more fragmented)
on the Sequent. in fact, the truth is to the contrary. quot is not run on
any NFS file system: all file systems are on disks attached to the machines
themselves. i have done diffs on the source to quot(8) as provided by both
Berkeley and Sequent, and there are no perceivable semantic differences.

as well, the Sequent makes a similarly poor showing in this context
against Vaxes running Ultrix, as well as Sun and Mips-based Dec workstations
running their particular flavors of Unix.

can anyone tell me why the Sequent system performs orders of magnitude
worse than each of our other machines (or for that matter, all of our other
machines *combined*)? the inferences concerning relative file system
performance that can be drawn from these observations are rather disturbing.
any help would be most appreciated.
-- 
Michael Collier		University of New Mexico Computing Center
collier@ariel.unm.edu	2701 Campus Blvd.
(505) 277 8039		Albuquerque, NM  87131

			(Home:	1160 Don Pasqual NW
				Los Lunas, NM 87031)

...!cmcl2!beta!unm-la!unmvax!charon!collier