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From: truesdel@ics.uci.edu (Scott Truesdell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: Re: Increasing RAM on AppleShare Server
Keywords: RAM AppleShare
Message-ID: <1989Oct12.114440.27973@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 12 Oct 89 11:44:40 GMT
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Lee Ankeny mentions testing LocalTalk and EtherTalk AppleShare
implementations and coming up with negligible performance differences.
He is not the first person to point this out to me. Someone with
experience with EtherTalk on my same campus emailed me to state the the
improvement just wasn't that great.  Frankly I'm shocked, and I
volunteered to come look for bottlenecks.  It seems, though, that this
lack of blazing speed improvement is not uncommon.

The only experience I have had with Macs on EtherNet is on a small
Novell network. I was very favorably impressed with the performance of
this setup. Very. As in, "almost as fast as a local hard disk". The
Novell server is an Everex Step 386 with a large, fast HD (I forget
which make).

I still think something's fishy with the EtherTalk setups. Unless we are
looking at the software being the bottleneck. And, at Ethernet speeds,
the performance of a Plus, such as Lee tested, would be quite noticeable.
I know good hardware is not the bottleneck. I routinely ftp between my
ethernet-equiped Mac and our campus's large UNIX machines at 20k/sec and
the same file via [empty] LocalTalk/AppleShare goes at ave. 14k/sec. So
what's the difference?

   Time of day / peak useage.

If I were to perform the same transfers during peak useage, the ftp
would drop to around 10k-15k/sec while the LocalTalk would drop to it's
knees around .25 - .5k/sec or worse. What this shows to me is that the
cabling scheme is like the freeway/expressway while the servers and
clients and their software are like the on-ramps and off-ramps. Ethernet
is basically buying you more lanes on the freeway. 

I guess this also points out where the ral benefits of EtherNet lie.

  --scott
 
--
Scott Truesdell