[Simh] Curious Observation About SIMH VAX Simulator...

[Robert Alan Byer]

I've been noticing a few things now about the VAX simulator and wondered
if anyone has seen the same behavior.

No matter what machine I'm running it on, no matter the OS or even using the
pre-compiled executables from the site, I'm seeing various degrees of 
"slowness".

What I mean is, one time it will boot OpenVMS lighting fast, almost as 
fast as my
Alpha (running on my 2.6GHz P4 laptop).  But if I shut down, close the 
window and
come back and restart, its as slow as a dog sometimes taking up to 15 
minutes to
boot up OpenVMS.  The problem is, it's random, sometimes the first run 
can take
5 to 15 minutes other times it starts right up.  I had one run that took 
over a half
hour to boot OpenVMS.

I thought that maybe it was my system.  I've tried this on just about 
every machine
I can get my hands on and I see the same thing.  I've compiled my own 
version
under MinGW, Cygwin, Solaris and Linux and see the same thing.  All the 
compiles
were without any optimizations (-O0) and the -march flag set to the 
machines CPU type.

I've tried with and without ethernet support, same thing, random slowdowns.

It's just strange, one run will be fast and I can get a lot done, other 
boots I have
to wait  forever for it just to come up.  It just seems like on the fast 
runs "something"
is being initialized or set up faster than the other runs for some reason.

Anyone else noticed this?  Any ideas here?

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