ADSM-L

Re: GUI hangs

1999-07-14 16:10:44
Subject: Re: GUI hangs
From: Thomas Denier <Thomas.Denier AT MAIL.TJU DOT EDU>
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 16:10:44 -0400
I restarted the selective restore described in my previous note just before I
went to lunch. The GUI client finally started moving files shortly after I
returned, about an hour and five minutes after I started the process. In all
that time the GUI never showed any sort of progress indication. For most of
the time 'query session' commands issued from an administrative client session
showed no evidence of activity. The GUI did not give any sort of projected
time for the 'Preparing...' stage.

In 1984 I worked at a university that had a research contract with IBM. Part
of the contract involved developing software to run on a PC. IBM sent us a
copy of their user interface guidelines for PC DOS applications. These
required, among other things, that a program performing a prolonged task
display some form of progress indicator to show users that the program was in
fact doing useful work. I find it astounding that a recent release of the ADSM
GUI client fails to measure up to the usability standards of 1984.

While the selective restore was running, I discovered that about 90 percent of
the files it was going to restore would be superfluous. I stopped the restore,
changed the selection criteria, and restarted the restore. A restore of about
3000 files finished in less than an hour. The initial restore of about 30,000
files spent longer than that 'Preparing...' and was still running well over
two hours after it started. It would appear that the duration of the
'Preparing...' stage depends mainly on the number of files to be restored, not
the number in the file system. Given this, I can't imagine what the program
was doing with the 30,000 file names for all that time.
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