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From: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Open question on NFS, efficiency, etc.
Message-ID: <288@sequent.cs.qmc.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 3-Sep-87 06:57:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: sequent.288
Posted: Thu Sep  3 06:57:29 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 27-Sep-87 10:07:08 EDT
References: <586@winchester.UUCP>
Reply-To: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts)
Organization: CS Dept, Queen Mary College, University of London, UK.
Lines: 36
Keywords: NeWS, X, window servers, binaries
Summary: Window servers mean smaller binaries

Expires:

Distribution:


>What are the tradeoffs between:
>       a) diskless nodes + servers
>       vs
>       b) window-server terminals + (bigger?) servers
>in terms of:
>       a) cost per seat
>       b) ease of use
>       c) overall response time
>       d) General program-structuring issues.

With a good window server, all of the detailed code for
handling the physical device is in the window server process,
NOT attached to every binary that might one day use the device.
This has some effect on binaries for use with X (even though
the X device independence stuff is an awful compromise), but
the effects of using NeWS, with its high-level primitives and
Turing-equivalent server, are staggering:

A realistic program doing tricky segmented graphics and 2D
animation has a binary of 737200 bytes when running under
SunView, but running under NeWS, it reduced to 147450 bytes,
i.e. to 20% of the original size!

With diskless nodes, you need to pull BIG binaries across the
network to handle your display. With window servers, you can
have much smaller binaries, device independence etc. This
suggests that you need the window server code resident in the
diskless workstation, hence the idea of window-server terminal.

The knock-on effect of smaller binaries is hard to judge - does
it reduce the cost per seat by reducing the cost per server?
-- 

William Roberts         ARPA: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk  (gw: cs.ucl.edu)
Queen Mary College      UUCP: liam@qmc-cs.UUCP
LONDON, UK              Tel:  01-980 4811 ext 3900