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From: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Open question on NFS, efficiency, etc.
Message-ID: <7779@slate.BBN.COM>
Date: Mon, 10-Aug-87 17:46:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: slate.7779
Posted: Mon Aug 10 17:46:36 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 11-Aug-87 06:44:49 EDT
References: <8730@brl-adm.ARPA>
Reply-To: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau)
Organization: BBN Laboratories Incorporated, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 33

In comp.unix.wizards (<8730@brl-adm.ARPA>), ultra!wayne@ames.arpa 
(Wayne Hathaway) writes:
>While waiting at my diskless Sun workstation for a "cp" to complete,
>an obvious question wandered into my otherwise empty head.  
 
[Describes the "cp" problem on diskless workstations: cp copies
  data over the net to your diskless host, then copies it right
  back to the server.]

>							  So in other
>words, the time perceived by the workstation user went from 86 seconds
>down to 21 seconds, with no apparent increase in server load!  

It gets more interesting when you start talking about large compiles.
Compiling the system I work on (on the order of a couple of hundred K
lines of code, in a couple of hundred files, all on one server) from 
scratch my diskless 3/75 workstation takes around 2 hours.  Compiling
on the server takes only about a third as long.  Needless to say, 
we've all taken to using "on server make" when we want compile the
system!

Another interesting number to think about is amount of traffic on
the local ethernet.  We did some back of the envelope calculations 
based on compiling all the sources and building all the libraries to
generate our 3 megabyte binary.  Taking into account all the various 
temp files and such that get used, we estimated that we move 30 to 50 
megabytes of data across the network, none of which is necessary if
the whole compile is done on the server.  Given the usual load on
the network around here, just moving that much data across the net
eats up a significant amount of time!
-- 
 Matt Landau			A rock feels no pain...
 mlandau@bbn.com		    ...and an island never cries.