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From: philip@pescadero.Stanford.EDU (Philip Machanick)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: ROM Disk and other machines?
Message-ID: <1990Nov11.194615.15478@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 11 Nov 90 19:46:15 GMT
References: <1990Nov9.032405.13315@cs.utk.edu> <1990Nov9.044036.7385@cs.umn.edu> <1990Nov9.163823.29938@cs.utk.edu> <1990Nov11.012533.8672@cs.dal.ca>
Sender: news@Neon.Stanford.EDU (USENET News System)
Reply-To: philip@pescadero.stanford.edu
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Lines: 35

In article <1990Nov11.012533.8672@cs.dal.ca>, chapman@ug.cs.dal.ca (Paul Chapman) writes:
|> In article <1990Nov9.163823.29938@cs.utk.edu> wnn@ornl.gov (Wolfgang N. Naegeli) writes:
|> >In article <1990Nov9.044036.7385@cs.umn.edu> kanefsky@cs.umn.edu (Steve 
|> >Kanefsky) writes:
|> >> Come to think of it, I can't imagine how slow it would be to have a lab
|> >> full of Classics running diskless over LocalTalk (or PhoneNet or 
|> >whatever).
|> >> Perhaps with some extra RAM and a healthy RAM cache...
|> >
|> >Many schools really are on a shoestring budget and willing to sacrifice 
|> >performance for having the basic capability at all. I know of a couple of 
|> >labs that boot off a floppy, but run all their applications off the server.
[Sluggish performance of MacJanet]
|> >Once an application is running, little access is made to the System 
|> >Folder. If you select your applications carefully, you can get pretty 
|> >decent performance even with some 20 machines off a single AppleShare 
|> >server. WriteNow, for example, preforms admirably in such situations.
[More sluggish performance of MacJanet]
|>   Although I suppose MacJanet is better than nothing, I am currently
|> confined to using the MS-DOS computers in the next room. Much though I
|> would like to use the Macs, they're just too slooow. A friend of mine who
|> uses an Amiga got an unfairly bad impression of Macintoshes after he spent a
|> good afternoon trying to get something productive out of them.
My experience of running off a server (both MacServe and later AppleShare) is
you absolutely have to have plenty of RAM and big RAM caches to get respectable
performance. The caches need to be on the user machines; more RAM on the server
doesn't help nearly as much. The exact size of cache needed depends on your
application. If you have things carefully set up, the performance should come
close to local diskette (I haven't tried ethernet; if you can afford this,
you can probably also afford local hard disks). I don't know how your MacJanet
machines are configured. I suggest you look in the Control Panel and see if
you can bump the RAM cache up a bit.
-- 
Philip Machanick
philip@pescadero.stanford.edu