Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ncar!ico!auto-trol!marbru
From: marbru@auto-trol.UUCP (Martin Brunecky)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re:  Computing resources used up by X
Message-ID: <767@auto-trol.UUCP>
Date: 27 Jul 90 14:19:34 GMT
References: <9007262124.AA18843@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU>
Reply-To: marbru@auto-trol.com (Martin Brunecky)
Organization: Auto-trol Technology, Denver
Lines: 37

In article <9007262124.AA18843@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU> mouse@LARRY.MCRCIM.MCGILL.EDU writes:
>> I have heard that running X on a Sun Sparcstation uses up close to
>> half of the available mips.  Is this true?
>
>Yes and no...Running X on a machine can use up anything from nearly
>zero to nearly all of the available cycles.  It all depends on what
>you're doing, and is true regardless of the machine (unless the machine
>is incredibly slow, in which case the minimum percentage is higher).
>

   Half of available mips ??? Why not ALL ???

   For whatever reason, people keep forgetting that to get 16x more
   performance than from VAX 11/780 they need not only 16x faster CPU
   chip, but also 16x more memory, 16x faster disk I/O channel ....

   The problem with SPARcstation is that at 8MB it can barely deal with
   resident portion of UNIX and Sun's X server (though the later is
   getting better). Now you want to add couple X applications, so that
   you start to exercise Unix paging/swapping algoritms - and the
   result is inevitable: you perform at or below that bashed, obsolete
   VAX 11/780, which at least (when it used Massbus) had decent I/O
   channels. Plus, it's paging algoritms (though far from being perfect)
   have been designed for multitasking, not a for a single thread.

   So, back to history. The key word for VAX 11/780 performance in the
   first half of 80's was:

       B U Y   M O R E   M E M O R Y   !!!!!!

   For whatever reason, history still goes in circles.

-- 
=*= Opinions presented here are solely of my own and not those of Auto-trol =*=
Martin Brunecky                   marbru@auto-trol.COM
(303) 252-2499                    {...}ncar!ico!auto-trol!marbru
Auto-trol Technology Corp. 12500 North Washington St., Denver, CO 80241-2404