Xref: utzoo comp.sys.hp:2503 comp.sys.apollo:3144 comp.protocols.nfs:297 comp.protocols.misc:626
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!apollo!mishkin
From: mishkin@apollo.COM (Nathaniel Mishkin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp,comp.sys.apollo,comp.protocols.nfs,comp.protocols.misc
Subject: Re: A Comparison of Commerical RPC Protocols
Keywords: RPC Apollo Sun Netwise
Message-ID: <44a7f591.1d6d5@apollo.COM>
Date: 26 Jul 89 19:45:00 GMT
References: <6567@joshua.athertn.Atherton.COM> <951@anise.acc.com> <10258@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Reply-To: mishkin@apollo.com (Nathaniel Mishkin)
Organization: Apollo Computer, Chelmsford, MA
Lines: 35

I'm trying (as I did in my previous posting) to cut down the cross-posting
here.  Let's try to move the rest of this conversation to comp.protocols.misc.

In article <10258@boulder.Colorado.EDU> carla@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Carla Mowers) writes:
>The results presented in Joshua Levy's RPC paper are based on data that is
>now nearly nine months old. An article I've posted to comp.misc contains
>some performance measurements based on new releases of both the Netwise
>and Apollo products. A new Sun product has not been released since Joshua's
>measurements were made.

Actually, the NCS versions (1.0 and 1.1) are more or less the same, in
terms of functionality and performance.  You don't want to know the mess
that's been made of version numbers.  Apollo OS versions sr10.1 and later
have a newer version of NCS with improved bulk data performance.  (This
version is called NCS 1.5.)  These improvements will also appear in a
new NCS version running on Apollo (sr10.2) and non-Apollos and will be
called NCS 1.5.1.

>Of course, you should probably take any numbers presented here with a large
>grain of salt. What one party measures doesn't necessarily correlate well to
>the environment another is interested in. 

Some grains of salt:  The data reported in your paper was obtained by
running client and server on the same machine.  I have to take a fair
bit of exception with this.  I would imagine that the time to make a
remote call is dominated (or at least significantly determined by) the
networking costs (i.e. the cost of sending and receiving network messages).
The cost of sending intra-machine network messages can be assumed to
be roughly zero (relative to the inter-machine cost, anyway).  Your tests
may thus have measured the relative speeds of things that are a small
fraction of the total cost of making a remote call.
-- 
                    -- Nat Mishkin
                       Apollo Computer Inc., Chelmsford, MA
                       mishkin@apollo.com