Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!linus!philabs!gcm!dc From: dc@gcm (Dave Caswell) Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp Subject: Re: hp9000 ser. 500 hpux Message-ID: <427@white.gcm> Date: 16 Mar 88 06:41:36 GMT References: <987@maccs.UUCP> <4760006@hpfcls.HP.COM> <672@kuling.UUCP> Reply-To: dc@white.UUCP (Dave Caswell) Organization: Greenwich Capital Markets, Greenwich, CT Lines: 69 In article <672@kuling.UUCP> irf@kuling.UUCP (Bo Thide) writes: :When we bought our 9000/540 little over 4 years ago we heard about :the new FOCUS II CPU, so we started out with a single FOCUS I. Later :when we upgraded to include also a FOCUS II plus 2 more MB of ("commercial") :RAM we experienced a tremendous increase in throughput. What we then hoped :for was of course a FOCUS III (with a higher clock frequency etc), but no, :instead HP discontinued the 500 series altogether.... : :We think that was an unwise decision, especially since the 500 is something :of an engineering masterpiece. The finstrate cards are really something to :impress hardware people with ... Not only do they look nice but they run :and run. In fact, in all these years we haven't had any hardware problems :whatsoever with our 540. And the multi-CPU configuration turned it into a real :workhorse being able to support a large number of users (typically 10-15) :simultaneously without any noticable degradation in turn-around. Let your users try a SUN 3 for a day and see if they feel the same way about performance. Try the basic benchmark. How many times can the date command run in a second. 12 on a Sun 3 on a HP (using c-shell on both). Time to compile the empty program main() {} over twice as long on the HP etc. I'm sure that just like any other vendor people's experiences vary widely. Below is a partial list of problems I encountered in at two different companies using HP-UX on a series 500. I have walked into the computer room and been able to see and smell the smoke coming from those gold plated circuit boards. At another company we were plagued with frequent system crashes, easily over 20 in a one year period. There is nothing like having all your work end as the system console is filled with rows and rows of digits; when HPUX crashes a "tombstone" (a list of values in memory) is produced. I have a four line C program and yes three of them are main { } that when compiled with the right options will crash the system. This is unrelated to the crashing problem above. The C shell besides being incredibly slow would often go into an infinite loop and have to be killed. Curses was so buggy as to be unusable. It wouldn't keep the screen consistent. FILE system problems. Two files of the same name in a directory. Type "ls a" and see two files listed. "Mv a b" and then "mv a c" fixed the problem. Fsck saying "remove inode with size zero?" and then immediately exiting without giving the user a chance to answer. Fsck saying something like "invalid file / remove?". I didn't have the nerve to answer that one at all for a while. Rm saying something like "can not delete non-existent file". You can delete it by using fsdb to change its inode type to 5 and then doing a fsck to remove an unallocated inode. "ls -l" first prints the non-existent files and then the existing files. Once the creation date of every file in a directory was changed to the same date (and no we didn't say touch *). Once the disk got completely corrupted with hundreds of files missing or liked into lost and found. The strange thing is that all these file system problems happened during "normal use". We have had at least five power failures and things like that without even a problem. I would be just going through the edit, comiles and debug route and do an ls of my directory and see a file listed twice. Naturally your first thought is that it has an embedded unprintable character, but no.