SUMMARY: Ram for SPARCSERVER/330

From: Dave Shevett (sparc!shevett@erika.bighouse.unipress.com)
Date: Fri Sep 04 1992 - 19:35:23 CDT


Wow! A whopping consensus on this question :)

My original post:

>We have a Sun SparcServer/330 serving a dozen or so workstations and
>Xterminals. It has 24 meg installed in it (8 on the motherboard, and
>16 on an expansion board - all 1 meg SIMMS).
>
>VMSTAT is showing excessive paging about 20 percent of the time. 'po'
>on the display will jump to 300-400 for a half a minute or so, then
>drop down to only a few. Many times, it will hover around 70-80 for
>a while before settling down again.
>
>We have been noticing slowdowns on this machine, and I am fairly
>convinces that the lack of RAM is the main culprit (netstat shows
>about a 3% collision rate - that ain't the problem.)
>
>Soooooo - here's what I want to do. I've found a good source for
>RAM, and I'd like to replace the 8 meg of 1 meg SIMMS on the motherboard
>with 4 meg simms, bringing us up to 48 meg of RAM. I am *fairly*
>sure that the ram we need is joe normal 70ns 4 megabyte simms, as
>would be installed in a PeeCee. Is this correct?
>
>Last question - is there a jumper on the Sparc m-board I have to
>change to reflect the fact that the ram has changed from 1 meg
>to 4 meg simms?

I got 10-15 responses within 12 hours of posting the message. The
consensus being that yes, you can use standard 4megx9 simms in
the SparcServer/330, but you have to change a jumper (cleverly marked
'4MEG' - it's jumper J1900.)

The RAM I'm getting is going for about $33 a meg in the 4meg SIMMS
configuration, so I'm pretty happy with the pricing. Still gonna run
us over a grand for this purchase...

I can include complete summaries if anyone wants 'em. Again thanks
to all who responded, but I got a weak response on the real root of
the problem:

The SparcServer is not only our fileserver, but many of our users
just log into 'sparc' (the server), and use it directly (ie running
their programs on it, etc). We have perhaps 14 workstations and
8 ascii terminals connected in. Each workstation runs perhaps 4-6
xterms at a given time (all running on 'sparc'). Hence the need for
more RAM, but am I pushing the performance envelope of this poor 330?

Thanx for all the help - sun-managers is a life saver :)

---------------------.--------------------.--------------------------------
Dave Shevett | Unipress Software | "The shortest distance between
Systems Jockey | Edison, NJ USA | two puns is a straight line..."
shevett@unipress.com | (908)287-2100 x921 | - Doc Webster



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