Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!xylogics!world!bzs
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Single user vs. shared
Message-ID: <1990Apr10.225542.13662@world.std.com>
Date: 10 Apr 90 22:55:42 GMT
References: <1712@aber-cs.UUCP>
Organization: The World @ Software Tool & Die
Lines: 40
In-Reply-To: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP's message of 5 Apr 90 12:27:24 GMT


From: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP (Piercarlo Grandi)
>In article <8840010@hpfcso.HP.COM> dgr@hpfcso.HP.COM (Dave Roberts) writes:
>  In school we had a lab full of Sun 3/50s which were all diskless (via NFS)
>  to a server.  There were about 50 machines on an ethernet which worked
>
>Note that 50 machines to a single server is *crazy*. I would not go over a
>dozen; and even with multiple servers I think that 50+ hosts doing heavvy
>traffic on a single Ethernet requires some careful analysis.

Gee, Piercarlo, do you ever work from facts forward rather than the
other way around? He said the 50 workstations worked fine except
during peak load (finals), what else is new? Every utility on earth is
set up this way. So you say the set-up is crazy?  Why? Because it
worked? Because it offends your intuitive sensibilities?

>  ...Now a bunch of CS majors do a lot of
>  compiling when they're trying to get those projects done (very disk
>  intensive) and during this time it took forever to get anything done.
>
>NFS was designed to exchange data easily across heterogenous machines; a kind
>of automatic 'ftp'. It is being used as a file service system. Too bad that it
>offers *horrible* performance. You suffered the consequences.

I thought compiling hasn't been disk intensive for years, it's CPU
intensive. Does anyone have measurements? That doesn't stop you from
running with this lead and drawing conclusions based on it.

The truth of the matter is that you can't take upper-limit numbers
based on burst activities and derive all sorts of conclusions about
the entire system.

To be frank, I don't trust your intuitions. I'd rather see some data.

Perhaps that's rude.
-- 
        -Barry Shein

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