Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!daemon
From: cks@white.toronto.edu (Chris Siebenmann)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: X-terms v. PCs v. Workstations
Summary: The bottleneck is hard thinking...
Message-ID: <89Dec5.151758est.27219@snow.white.toronto.edu>
Date: 5 Dec 89 20:19:25 GMT
References: <1498@aber-cs.UUCP>
Sender: <daemon>
Organization: Ziebmef home away from home
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pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
...
| 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.

 Does anyone? This isn't an idle question; I'm not aware of any papers
or studies on the disk access patterns of modern workstation-oriented
environments. All the disk access pattern studies I know of are
several years old, and done on old-style centralized machines that
everyone talked to via a dumb terminal. No one has really studied a
workstation plus file server environment, or an x-terminal and compute
server one. We're working on it here, and already have gotten some
surprising numbers (well, surprising to me!).

 If people are aware of such performance summaries, please send me
email with detail. In the absence of such studies, I think it's very
hard to come up with accurate speculation (it's also worth noting that
we currently have very bad tools for the average sysadmin to find and
cure performance bottlenecks; tuning a distributed system still
involves a lot of guesswork and experience).

-- 
	"I shall clasp my hands together and bow to the corners of the world."
			Number Ten Ox, "Bridge of Birds"
Chris Siebenmann		...!utgpu!{ncrcan,ontmoh!moore}!ziebmef!cks
cks@white.toronto.edu	     or ...!utgpu!{,csri!}cks