Part of the peculiarities of the university environment is that universitiesare not businesses. Well, yes, of course. But consider one of theimplications: universities do not directly make money.

In a company, you can justify a more expensive thing on the groundsthat it never the less makes the company more money, either directlyor indirectly (through increased productivity, for example). Because acompany makes money, what matters is not the absolute expense but theprofit/expense ratio.

(It matters so much that

This week, we:

• got 12,549 messages from 259 different IP addresses.
• handled 19,129 sessions from 1,520 different IP addresses.
• received 291,606 connections from at least 79,247 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 8 connections being checked at once.

Connection volume is up pretty noticeably from last week . Connection volume fluctuated overthe map over the week:

When vendors started releasing Unix systems with a unified buffercache , people discovered that the new operatingsystem releases tended to perform not so well under load. Generallywhat happened is that programs got paged out madly, so any time youtyped a new command line in your shell session there was a great biglurch as your shell was paged back in and then the program startedand so on, and by the time you got back to your shell it had pagedout again.

The underlying problem is that processes can use up