Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!europa.asd.contel.com!sura.net!haven!udel!princeton!njin!limonce From: limonce@pilot.njin.net (Tom Limoncelli) Newsgroups: comp.unix.amiga Subject: Re: second thoughts on buying a 3000UX Message-ID: Date: 28 Feb 91 08:13:51 GMT References: <61751@masscomp.westford.ccur.com> <1135@applix.com> Organization: Drew University - Madison NJ Lines: 86 [Excuse the length of this. It's late and my writing gets more verbose as I get tired. Though, it does reveal some nice things about the 3000UX.] In article <1135@applix.com> scotte@applix.com (Scott Evernden) writes: > In my opinion, if you have no need for the AmigaDOS stuff, then you've > eliminated the only good reason to get the 3000UX. A very common misconception! The 3000UX makes a great Unix box on its own. First of all, it's a very complete Unix. Nothing is left out (though you can disable anything you want :-) ). That alone makes it a step ahead of many other systems. [description of the X performance you want, among other things.] > In the end, I decided to brew myself a 486/33 box. It has up to now, > satisified these requirements (and others) for X and unix development > purposes. You spend that much to get the performance you wanted? Ugh! You really should look into a Amiga 3000UX. You'll get the same performance (no, not on CPU-bound tasks... but you were talking about development and X windows; both are disk & video i/o intensive). Here's why: I was recently at a "normal" party (not too many computing professionals there) and found myself participating in a discussion about how SVR4 was slow and what could be done about it. A person there explained what was done to speed SVR4 up, and what things were added that resulted in slowing it down. The conclusion was that to get the best performance you HAD to have a really good I/O system. You *can* have a good I/O system on a 486 or 386 box, but not if you use a machine designed for MS-DOS use. In other words, 486/386 SVR4 Unix must be on a totally "designed-for-Unix" box. [I believe NCR's new line is like this.] This tuning/performance information was according to the person at the party. Then I described the Amiga 3000UX's I/O system. How memory was quite fast and I/O was on this blindly fast system, DMA, 32-bits, etc. etc. She said that such a system would beat a 486 on I/O so much so that all the "speed problems" of SVR4 would diminish, and you could get the performance you want. In other words, the Amiga 3000UX would make for one of the best possible SVR4 boxes. SVR4 wants a machine with a superior DMA system and fast RAM. (Most 386/486 boxes disable their DMA because it doesn't work or isn't standard.) Lack of a good DMA system and horridly slow video-ram on the 486/386 is a major problem for SVR4. The system works the worst on the machine with the biggest market! This all seemed strange to me. How could a person at some random party know so much about this? Well, I asked her for some credentials. It turned out she is on the performance and tuneing enhancement team for SVR4. The party happen to be at a house only 25 minutes from the (new) home of Unix, Short Hills, New Jersey. Strange thing about living in Morris County. You never know who you'll find yourself talking to at a party. > -scott > > Flames, anyone? Hmmm... I'm not sure if this was a flame. I guess I feel sad for you because you spent so much money on a 486 machine; you paid for a lot of CPU power to offset a bad I/O system. -Tom P.S. The conclusion was that the best SVR4 system would have to have superior DMA for all I/O, very fast video ram, (get this!) the Unix file system (she said that her tests showed that a well-tuned UFS was actually faster than a well-tuned Berkeley FFS!), a disk block size and page size had to be equal, and a couple things that don't come to mind right now. Basically, in my mind, she unintentionally described the Amiga 3000UX.