Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!bu-cs!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!pcg
From: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP (Piercarlo Grandi)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: X-terms v. PCs v. Workstations
Summary: The bottleneck is hard thinking...
Message-ID: <1498@aber-cs.UUCP>
Date: 30 Nov 89 14:38:58 GMT
Reply-To: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi)
Organization: Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth
	(Disclaimer: my statements are purely personal)
Lines: 161

In article <1989Nov28.204639.11237@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> jonah@db.toronto.edu (Jeffrey Lee) writes:
    quiroz@cs.rochester.edu (Cesar Quiroz) writes:
    
    >    THE PROBLEM IS NOT TECHNOLOGICAL.

The problem is educational and sociological/political, agreed. Too bad that
too many CPU/system architecture guys assume that system administrators out
there have the same understanding of issues as they have, and can be
expected to second guess them, and can carefully tune it which is plainly
preposterous. 

I remember reading Stonebraker, reminiscing on Ingres, and saying that he
had chosen static vs. dynamic indexes because careful analysis indicated
that would be slighlty more efficient, and then discovering that ingres DBAs
would not realize they needed to rebuild the static index after updates had
accumulated, even if this was clearly and insistently documented in the
manuals. This has made him a firm believer in foolproof, automatic self
tuning technoliogies, even if they are less effective and imply higher
overheads than those that require handcrafting, because the latter is
simply all too often not available.

And then not everything can be made foolproof:
    
    One of the camps has a predominantly decentralized (fileserver plus
    workstation) model.  General users are only allowed to login to
    workstations leaving the file servers to manage NFS requests plus one
    other task (mail, nameservice, news, YP, etc.)  Performance used to be
    miserable in the middle of the day with constant
    NFS-server-not-responding messages and *slow* response for swapping.

This because your sysadmin does not understand diskless machines, and their
performance implications. A 40 meg SCSI disc can be had for $450 mail order,
and attached to a diskless workstation to be used for swapping and /tmp (or
/private) works incredible wonders. Swapping across the net, or doing /tmp
work across the net is intolerably silly. When you edit a file on the
classic diskless you copy it over block by block to the workstation from
your user filesystem, and then back block by block to the /tmp filesytem,
across the net both ways, tipically from/to the same server as well (while
one should at least put every workstations's /tmp and swap on a different
server than that used for user files and root)...

One of the greatest jokes I have recently seen is this NFS accelerator that
you put in the *server*, that costs $6995 (reviewed in Unix Review or World,
latest issue), which is about the same as for 15 (and I would certainly not
want to put over 15 workstations on single server, as ethernets are bad for
rooted patterns of communication) 40 meg disks you can add to each of the
*workstations*, thus cutting down dramatically on network traffic and
enjoying reduced latency and higher bandwidth as well. But of course,
sysadmins all over will rush to buy it, because of course it is *servers*
that need speeding up... Hard thinking unfortunately is more expensive than
kit.

*Large* workstation buffer caches (e.g. 25% of memory) also help a lot; if
you have Sun workstations, they come with especially bad defaults, as to the
ratio of buffer headers to buffer slots, which is 8 and should be 1-2, a
crucial point that clearly Sun has misconfigured to make customers waste
memory.
    
    The other camp has workstations and X-terminals.  It allows users to
    login to one of two combination file/compute server machines.  The
    workstations are mostly used to run an X server with remote xterms for
    login sessions.

A wonderful waste of resources... Do you *really* want to have a couple of
network X transactions (and context switches, and interrupts, etc...) for
each (actually, thanks to X batching, every bunch of) typed/displayed
character, e.g. under any screen editor? Why not use the workstation for
local editing and compiles?

    All CPU time is charged at the SAME hourly rate to encourage users to
    run their jobs on the fastest machines.  The reason:  swapping over NFS
							  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Which, as I said before, is as inane a thing as you can possibly do...

    puts a higher load on the servers than running the same jobs on the
    central machines.  Also, more gain can be had from adding 32MB to each
    server than adding 4MB to each workstation.

Not to mention that multiple workstations waste memory in having multiple
kernels and not sharing executable images, that have tended to grow
both ever larger. On the other hand, memory is not the only bottleneck.
Multiple workstations have multiple net interfaces, disc controllers, CPUs,
whose work can overlap in real time.

    Both camps are relatively open on quotas: they are imposed from below.
    You (or your sponsor) are charged for your CPU, modem/workstation
    connect time and disk usage.  When your disk partition fills up, you
    can't create any more files.  [Any everyone in your partition will gang
    up on you if you are at the top of the disk usage list.]

Using partitions as a quota mechanism is incredibly gross. Partitions should
be as few as possible and only to group files with similar backup
requirements. Charging for resource use is the best quota mechanism you have,
because it is self adjusting (if a resource is too popular, you can use
the fees from its use to expand it). It also simplifies administration in that
users can waste disc space as they feel like, as long as they pay for it (the
alternative is the sysadmin educating the users as to how economize on disc
consumption, which only happens if the sysadmin knows more about the issue
than the users).

    Both camps provide centralized backup, system administration, and
    expertise.
    ^^^^^^^^^

As to this I have some doubts... :-(
    
    Both camps are expanding their facilities.  The centralized computing
    camp is planning to add more memory to one of the central machines
    which is starting to get bogged down with swapping.

This may not be going to help. Adding faster swapping discs should be the
answer, and in particular having multiple swapping partitions on *distinct*
and fast controllers. If the working sets of all the active programs already
fit into memory, that is. Otherwise, adding memory to keep core resident some
inactive working sets just to avoid swapping them out/in to slow
discs/controllers is less sound than improving swapping device bandwidth
altogether.
    
    The net result: our experience show that (our brand of) centralized
    computing is a win over diskless-workstations.

The net result is that people like the many contributors to this newgroup
work very hard to squeeze performance out of state-of-the-art technology by
devising clever architectures, but the single greatest problem users have as
to performance out there is that system administration is a difficult task,
and nearly nobody does it properly, whether the system is centralized or
distributed. The tipical system administrator tipically does not understand
the performance profiles of machines, much less of systems or networks, and
does not have a clue as to what to do to make the wonder toys run, except to
ask for more kit.


PS: if you want to know what I think is the most effective configuration, I
think that may be small workstations (say a 4-8 meg, 2-4 MIPS engine) with a
small swap and /tmp disc (say 20-40 megs, 25 msec.) and large buffer caches
(say 1-2 megs, with 1024-2048 buffer headers), with large compute servers
(say 8-16-32 megs, 8-16 MIPS) again with a large swap and /tmp/disc (say
80-160 megs, 20 msec.), and small workstations with very fast disc
controllers (say E-SMD/fast SCSI/IPI boards, 2-4 megs/sec, 2 of them) as file
servers with user filesystems (say 4 300-600 meg discs), and users
filesystems split across the fileservers (say 8-12 workstations per server),
and the shared parts of / and /usr replicated identically on the fileservers
to split the load.

Users would do editing and compiles on the local workstations, and run large
applications on the compute servers. I would also like some X terminals
around for users, rather than developers, or for small time developers.  A
centralized solution is second best, as it has less inherent parallelism and
resiliency, but may be somewhat easier to administer.

Setups with many diskless (a misnomer -- so called diskless really have
remote discs) workstations and a single fileserver, usually with a single
large disc, as I have seen so often, have the worst performance possible, and
terrible administrative problems, while setups with many diskful workstation
each with their independent set of discs (tipically just one) etc... don't
have great performance, and are as difficult to administer.
-- 
Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi           | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcvax!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk


Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com