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Show ! ! ___: : ; ^ ; 67 The environment seeks to keep the overheads to a minimum for things that are done 9 0-9 8% of the time. This means that most of the time the machine will act as though it were far larger and faster than it actually is. Witness some statistics from Stanford where a Burroughs B-5000, a machine suited for algorithmic languages, actually ran most problems faster than an IBM 7090-a machine whose hardware was significantly faster than the B-5000. Of course, occasionally, the piper must be paid. The FLEX system seeks a graceful degradation in performance ds the load goes up. The machine simply appears to slow down. When there are too many active segments or numerous quite large segments in core memory, an increasing burden is put on the secondary storage. Where, most of the time, the cheap secondary storage allows the machine to look as though it had a large core memory, now saturation will force operating speeds to approach the speed of the secondary storage rather than that of the primary. Another interesting consequence of this point of view is that the environment works quite independently of the particular storage limitations and conversely the efficiency of the machine depends very much on diese same limitations. J |
