Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!ncar!ico!dougm
From: dougm@ico.isc.com (Doug McCallum)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Re: Novell Portable Netware on RISC Platforms?
Message-ID: <1990Nov1.153536.19281@ico.isc.com>
Date: 1 Nov 90 15:35:36 GMT
References: <134@frcs.UUCP> <1990Oct29.205632.15788@Eyring.COM> <1990Oct31.175210.9255@comm.wang.com>
Reply-To: dougm@ico.ISC.COM (Doug McCallum)
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Boulder CO
Lines: 21

In article <1990Oct31.175210.9255@comm.wang.com> lws@comm.wang.com (Lyle Seaman) writes:
...
>I'm wondering what you base this opinion on.  There's not a whole lot
>to STREAMS.  I don't think there really is any particular bottleneck
>in PNW (if there is, I'd sure like to know it) relative to Native.  I

STREAMS does have some problems that have adverse effects on performance.
We've seen them with other protocol stacks as well and it takes a lot
of work to work around the problems (mostly related to STREAMS scheduling
of queues).

>The lower performance of Portable is just the price you pay for having
>a general purpose system that can do other things besides be a NetWare
>server.   BTW, have you seen the performance differences between an
>ordinary UNIX box and an optimized NFS server?  Same situation, only 
>not even as extreme as the difference between Portable and Native.

The performance difference is much greater than one would expect.
I suspect it is just the level of maturity of the product and should
improve over time but it is still a lot worse than you should be able
to get out of a UNIX implementation.