Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!ksp
From: ksp@swrinde.nde.swri.edu (Keith S. Pickens)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs
Subject: Re: One file server or several?
Keywords: nfs, sparcstation, le0, ie0, lance
Message-ID: <23862@swrinde.nde.swri.edu>
Date: 17 Nov 89 16:01:16 GMT
References: <2669@levels.sait.edu.au> <36451@apple.Apple.COM> <1989Nov14.150708.2813@eng.umd.edu>
Reply-To: ksp@swrinde.UUCP (Keith S. Pickens)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas
Lines: 16

In article <1989Nov14.150708.2813@eng.umd.edu> smaug@eng.umd.edu (Kurt Lidl) writes:
>Another thing to consider is the actual ethernet chip in the machine
>you are buying.  The SparcStations have the LANCE ethernet chip
>(made by AMD) and the SparcServers have the Intel ethernet chip -- you
>can guess who makes this one.  The performance of the two chips
>is NOT even close to the same.  The le0 interface on the suns can
>really make mince-meat of an ie0 interface on the fileserver.  When
>this happens, NFS will do nasty things like swallow all your CPU
>time.  Gory details available by E-mail.

The 4/370 (SparcStation/SparcServer 370) uses the LANCE ethernet chip.
This same cpu is used in the SparcServer 390.  Older Sun-4/2X0 systems
used the the Intel ethernet chip.  The newer machines have been "improved".

	-keith
	 ksp@maxwell.nde.swri.edu