MultiView Mascot Support

MultiView Mascot Statistics

Disk Space

MultiView Mascot is supplied with:

• An executable binary for the character terminal windowing product itself, ‘mascot’.
• Executable binaries for MultiView DeskTop applications such as UNIX Manager.
• A standard text startup configuration file, ‘mascot.rc’.
• Numerous configurable text side files.

All of these files are supplied on tape or disk and consume approximately 1.5 Mbytes. Unless customized they are not compressed and installation involves a straightforward copy.

The MultiView Mascot Package

• Full character terminal windowing with a window manager interface.
  This is the standard form providing concurrent windowing for standard applications on standard character terminals.
• Full window manager for Alpha-windows terminal operation.
  This is also a standard mode of operation during which the internal terminal emulator and display manager functions in MultiView Mascot are disabled.
• Multiplexing and communications interface only with no terminal emulation, display manager or window manager interface.
  This is used as the UNIX host support for the ,MultiView DeskTop family of products. This mode is termed MultiView Host Support Server (HSS) and is supplied as standard with MultiView Mascot('mvw-ixsrv)'.

For each of the above modes the maximum number of user is also defined. Unless complied to not require them, the serial number and activation keys are entered during installation and these provide a level of copy protection as well as define the number of users.

Memory Size

MultiView Mascot has the following memory size characteristics:

• Shared code is approximately 600 Kbytes. This depends on the processor type. Code is significantly less for CISC processors (approximately 400 Kbytes).
• Data space per user is approximately 400 Kbytes.
• Data space per window is approximately 10 Kbytes. Color emulation's can consume more.

Different versions of UNIX handle memory management different ways and paging confuses memory sizing even further. Therefore, these figures are for guidance only.

Processing Load

MultiView Mascot presents very little processing load overhead. Quantifying such a load is very difficult and any numbers are very unreliable as they depend on so many other factors.

Loading can be best considered in five phases of operation:

1. If there is no input or output from MultiView Mascot then on most UNIX systems there will be virtually no load.
2. On input, the load is trivial and is comparable with input parsing for a shell.
3. When driving a standard character terminal, on output to a full screen window , the load is comparable with a pipe and 'pr'; on output to a window, the load is approximately twice this.
4. When driving an Alpha-Window terminal, on output, the load is small and is comparable with a pipe.
5. On startup, MultiView Mascot needs to load config files during 1-5 seconds, depending on the system, MultiView Mascot will process the startup files. This will appear to be intensive during these few seconds.

Performance

Performance for a product as MultiView Mascot is best considered as the responses seen by a user. This can be best summarized by stating that under normal circumstances and on most systems the speed limiting factor is serial line data rates of less than 19,200 Baud to the character terminal and not MultiView Mascot. This assumes that on large systems there are many users working and on small systems only a number of users are working such that a comparable amount of processing power is available to each user. MultiView Mascot can be tuned in order to improve performance for specific applications.