Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!venera.isi.edu!raveling
From: raveling@isi.edu (Paul Raveling)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: HP a good platform for SW development???
Keywords: software development tools, availability
Message-ID: <10309@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 27 Oct 89 19:35:03 GMT
References: <875@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Sender: news@venera.isi.edu
Reply-To: raveling@isi.edu (Paul Raveling)
Organization: USC Information Sciences Institute
Lines: 30


	P.S. to last post:

	Hopefully Sun's new products improve this, but I've never
	seen a slower X11 display server.  When I was using a
	9000/350, the Sun 4 monochrome server was about the same
	speed.  We don't have a color Sun 4, a color Solbourne 110
	was much slower than the 350.  One of our users with a
	color Sun 3 wanted to use X11 but never used the color server --
	he said it was far too slow to be usable.

	Without actually knowing about Sun's internals, but having
	seen similar situations elsewhere, I surmise that they may have
	made a key mistake in the architecture of their frame buffers.
	If this is the case they will have poured lots of blood, sweat,
	and tears into their new X11 & News servers, and this will
	help, but the architecture problem will always handicap their
	performance.

	This is more important than it may sound.  A paper by someone
	at IBM a few years ago investigated how interactive response
	time affected productivity, and found a very significant
	nonlinear relationship when response time approached and
	exceeded about 1/2 second -- slow response is magnified
	into proportionally MUCH lower productivity.


----------------
Paul Raveling
Raveling@isi.edu