[94] in Athena User Interface
Re: Startup Time.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Fri Jun 2 17:48:12 2000
Message-Id: <200006022148.RAA09689@No-Whammies.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: The events that comprise the history of the universe.
Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2000 17:48:04 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
As a general rule, humans get impatient if any operation takes about
more than 10 seconds.
On the I/S Athena survey, one of the more common complaints was that
Athena took too long to start up (and that Netscape took too long to
load). It does help a little if they have something interesting to
watch.
I am wondering how much of the time problem is going to be alleviated
by hardware upgrades...all of the Sparc 4s are coming out this summer,
right?
On the happier side, it might not be so bad if the interface is
considerably easier to use, even if there is a bit of a wait at the
beginning.
With regard to Netscape, I timed startups on my PII-333/64MB here on
the other side of a T1. It took 2:14 to start up the first time out
of the infoagents locker, compared to 0:14 once it was in the AFS
cache. With nothing to look at in that huge expanse of time, even I
began to suspect the load had failed.
And speaking of hardware issues, I fear that 64MB of RAM might not be
enough for Star Office under Linux. The cluster machines all have
128, right? If so, I need to go do testing on a more memorable
machine. 8)
-B.
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Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
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