May 2001

Boosting your e3000 productivity

Ramusage: more memory?

By Paul Gobes

Ramusage is a small, free MPE program that reports your current memory and determines how much is used by the system and how much is available to users. It then calculates the effect of adding various amounts of memory.

For our production system at Robelle, which currently has 112 Mb of memory, it showed that by adding only 64Mb of memory, we could double the amount available to users. Here’s the actual output:

RAMUSAGE [2.47] - LPS Toolbox [A.09b]
(c) 1995 Lund Performance Solutions

SERIES 928LX
MPE/iX 6.0
#CPUS: 1
Memory size: 112 MB (117,440,512 bytes; 28,672 4KB pages)

Memory usage by “type” of Object Class:

Class       #LogicalPages       #MB     % total


SYSTEM_CODE 3,406           13  11.9%
SYSTEM_DATA 10,443          40  36.4%
TURBO_DATA  2,923           11   10.2%
USER_CODE   4,234           16   14.8%
USER_DATA   2,882           11  10.1%
USER_STACK  1,548           6    5.4%
USER_FILE   3,235           12  11.3%

Totals:         28,671           111   100.0%
                                                

There are three downloadable formats: :LZW, Store-to-disk (STD) and tar.Z with instructions for each, but you must set up the Allegro account first:

:hello manager.sys
:newacct allegro, mgr; cap = &
AM,AL,GL,DI,CV,UV,LG,PS,NA,NM,CS,ND,SF,BA,IA,PM,MR,DS,PH
:altacct allegro;access=(r,x,l:any;w,a:ac)
:altgroup pub.allegro; cap = BA,IA,PM,MR,DS,PH; &
access=(r,x,l:any;w,a,s:ac)
:newgroup data.allegro; access=(r,x,l:any;w,a,s:ac)
:newgroup doc.allegro; access=(r,x,l:any;w,a,s:ac)
:newgroup help.allegro; access=(r,x,l:any;w,a,s:ac)

I chose the STD method and followed the sample found on the same Web page.

After downloading to my Windows PC I uploaded to my 3000 using FTP. If you have never enabled FTP on your e3000, it is easy. Just follow the instructions on the Web page at www.robelle.com/tips/ftp.html

C:\>ftp my3000
User (my3000.robelle.com:(none)): paul,manager.sys,pub
ftp> binary
ftp> put ramusage.std ramusage;rec=128,1,f,binary;code=2501
ftp> quit

Then on my 3000, I restored the files from the uploaded STD file:

:hello paul,manager.sys,pub
:file ramusage;dev=disc
:restore *ramusage; @.@.@; olddate; create

I then ran the program with the command

:run ramusage.pub.allegro

The Ramusage program, written by the legendary Stan Sieler, is a subset of the PAGES utility (part of the Lund Performance Solutions “System Manager’s Toolbox”). It does not use the Measurement Interface. so you won’t see high system overhead. When asked how to calculate the amount of memory to buy, Stan provides the following formula:

Money_available / price_per_MB = Amount_of_MB_to_buy.

In other words, buy as much as you can afford!

Now where do you buy more memory? Well, you can get it from HP: outfield.external.hp.com/cgi-bin/spi/main.pl if you know the part number...

Or you can try one of the 14 third-party vendors who are listed under ‘Memory’ at the comprehensive vendor listing at www.triolet.com/HPVend/hpvend.html.

Or try www.solutionstore3000.com for a list of vendors (select Product Name = Memory and leave every search criteria as “no option”).

For example, Kingston listed the 64Mb for our 928LX at $286, whereas HP was charging $1,090 (all prices are in US dollars). See the Kingston Web site at www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/kepler/mfrmod.asp.

Another source might be third-party hardware maintainers like the ICS Group (www.icsgroup.com) which had 128Mb for $600.

Finally, if you’re really lucky (and brave), there’s eBay (www.ebay.com). The day that I looked there were offers for 9x9 systems, so I contacted one of them (Sales@Hprecovery.com) and was quoted 128Mb for $95. At that price it was worth the risk.