RE: Microsoft as regulator [Was Re: Government utility style regulation]

["Elvey, Matthew" <melvey@findsvp.com>]

My Compaq (Deskpro 4000) PC used to overheat because of it.  Every few
mornings, I'd come in and see an error message.  The CPU temperature
alarm would go off because the indoor "high of the day" would be at 6AM,
just before the building a/c kicked in.  The OpenGL screensaver had been
keeping CPU usage at a steady 100%.

Thankfully, no one had ever run it on our server (Compaq 5000R).  One
day I noticed, while adding add'l processors, that one of the heat sinks
hadn't been properly installed-there was an air gap between the CPU and
the heat sink.  It also didn't have the monitoring software installed.
Woulda been completely fried.

The Unix screensavers I've seen all have sensible default behaviour,
though you can force them to eat up CPU (useful for stress testing...).
I recall a version of xlock that even had an option to set the niceness
level for you.

-----Original Message-----
From: Norm [mailto:normanmo@clark.net]
Sent: Friday, July 17, 1998 10:01 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list AM-INFO
Subject: Re: Microsoft as regulator [Was Re: Government utility style
regulation]


On Thu, 16 Jul 1998 14:24:58 -0400 (EDT), Eric M. Bennett wrote:

>I do, however, recall an amusing story of someone who discovered that
the
>reason his NT Server was performing so poorly was that the screen saver
>(the default Microsoft screensaver, IIRC) was using up most of the CPU
time.


     Sounds like he may have been trying to use one of M$'s OpenGL
based screensaver modules, they'll bring the entire system to it's
knees and should only be used if the machine is going to be completely
idle.  It's another example of 'gadgetry over functionality'.  Of
course in these kinds of cases the user carries at least some of the
responsibility.  There's absolutely no doubt that NT is a huge pig that
handles system resources extremely poorly, but then again anyone
adminstrating a server should know better than using a resource hungry
screensaver...probably the result of M$ training.

--
 ...Cheers,

 ...Norm

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