Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!bu-cs!dartvax!eleazar.dartmouth.edu!erics
From: erics@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Eric Schlegel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: MPW target market & usage
Message-ID: <16255@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: 20 Oct 89 14:49:44 GMT
Sender: news@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU
Reply-To: erics@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Eric Schlegel)
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Organization: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
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Results of my poll about what machines people use MPW on:

Seven people replied. (Thanks!!)

Including myself, we use MPW on 7 Pluses, 1 SE, and 3 Mac IIs.

Pluses:
    3 had 2.5 Mb
    2 had 2 Mb
    1 had 1 Mb
    1 memory size unspecified

SE: the SE had 1 Mb

IIs:
    2 had 5 Mb
    1 memory size unspecified


It's safe to say, I think, that although MPW's target market may be the
professional developer on a IIcx, lots of people are using it on Pluses
and SEs. Those same people are probably also on a more limited budget and
wish that MPW cost significantly less.

Also, here is an interesting reply from Dennis Cohen about MPW's disk
access bottleneck.

Eric Schlegel
eric.schlegel@dartmouth.edu
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For your informal poll on MPW usage:

At work, I use it on a 5MB Mac II
At home, I use it on a 2MB Plus

The interesting thing about this is that I have a dual 45MB SyQuest HD (the
MassMicro Duet), with average access at 24ms.  At the office, I am stuck with
Apple's slow internal 40MB drive.  The end result of all of this is that
builds are almost as fast at home as they are at the office.

This implies to me that the real bottleneck in MPW performance is disk access.

To test this out, I created a 3MB RamDisk on the II and ran MPW from it
(stripped down MPW folder) and got close to a 20x performance improvement
building two applications.                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

--
Dennis Cohen
Claris Corp.
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Disclaimer:  Any opinions expressed above are _MINE_!
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