🚀 go-pugleaf

We have a Sparcstation 2 which is used by a number of people. Some of them
run number-crunching jobs and others run symbolic math packages such as
REDUCE and Mathematica. Recently, the symbolic math people have begun to
run jobs which grab most of the virtual memory on the machine so that it
spends most of its time swapping pages of VM between real memory and disk.
This really kills the response of the machine for interactive users,
so we would like to find some way of suspending these memory-hogging
jobs during the daytime and re-starting them at night when fewer people
are using the machine interactively.

Is it possible to do this ? Increasing the 'nice' level of the job doesn't seem
to make much difference -- the symbolic math jobs still slow the system
by VM swapping even at nice=10 or higher. We'd like to find some way of
removing the jobs from the system during the daytime and putting them back
and re-starting them at night. This kind of control is available on other
operating systems (e.g. VMS) via a batch control system. Does anything like
this exist for Sparcstations ?

We'd be grateful for any suggestions to prevent war breaking out between
our number-crunchers and our symbolic math users :-)

In case you're interested, our symbolic math people are calculating Groebner
bases. Unfortunately, they can't split their jobs into smaller pieces --
they just give REDUCE or Mathematica the command to calculate the basis
of a set of equations, then sit back and wait ...

-- David Harper (someone who likes cats) --

Astronomy Unit,             JANET:         adh@uk.ac.qmw.star
School of Math Sciences     INTERNET etc.: adh@star.qmw.ac.uk
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