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From: chapman@ug.cs.dal.ca (Paul Chapman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: ROM Disk and other machines?
Message-ID: <1990Nov12.050931.1234@cs.dal.ca>
Date: 12 Nov 90 05:09:31 GMT
References: <1990Nov9.163823.29938@cs.utk.edu> <1990Nov11.012533.8672@cs.dal.ca> <1990Nov11.194615.15478@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
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In article <1990Nov11.194615.15478@Neon.Stanford.EDU> philip@pescadero.stanford.edu writes:

[lots of old quotes]

>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.

  Of course, the mandarins at the UCIS computer centre decided that the
Control Panel would be just too dangerous for mere mortals to handle, so
it's not on the boot disks. Unfortunately, the boot disks are permanently
confined to the internal drive by means of a piece of paper stuck over the
slot. I am going to complain loudly to them though. The other problem is that
these computers only have 1 meg, so it'll probably start squeezing the
application area if the cache is too big.
  Over the summer, I set up a network of computers in Physics which had
their own hard drives. I almost can't believe how fantastically much
better they are than the ones run by UCIS (and I own a Mac!). They don't
have the right software for what I need though, and they also don't connect
to the Sun 4 that I'm writing this on. Oh, well. Thanks for the info, tho'.

- Paul

-- 
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