🚀 go-pugleaf

    We are using emacs on sun3's and sparcs. When several people are using
    emacs at the same time, the machine slows down to a crawl. I think that
    is because multiple copies of emacs are being loaded into memory.
    It seems to me that it would be more economical to have one copy of
    emacs in memory and for it to accept commands from several users
    simultaneously. 

seems to me that enough of emacs is made "pure" -- loaded into the
read-only text segment and shared by all users -- that you already
have this benefit.  also, each emacs is customized by users with
different variables, routines, etc., and all this is already kept
separate and would have to continue to be separate.  the lion's share
of the unsharable memory is from keeping around everyone's buffers in
memory, and that wouldn't change by having a single emacs process
accepting commands from multiple users.

sounds like you need to buy more memory or buy more workstations!  i'm
not surprised that having many users run emacs on a single
workstation would cause you to page a lot.  

Fred