Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pacbell!varian!kinetics!minshall
From: minshall@kinetics.UUCP (Greg Minshall)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: Re: Speed of LocalTalk, gateways
Message-ID: <639@kinetics.UUCP>
Date: 21 Oct 88 20:53:32 GMT
References: <964*kenw@noah.arc.cdn>
Organization: Kinetics, Inc., Walnut Creek, CA
Lines: 32

From article <964*kenw@noah.arc.cdn>, by kenw@noah.arc.CDN (Ken Wallewein):
> 
>   I keep hearing about people saying LocalTalk is slow.  Frankly, I'm 
> skeptical.  
... 
>   I've been doing a little checking, comparing different kinds of sources.
> Here are informal, approximate times to launch MacWrite.  Note: these are
> _approximate_ times only! 
> 
> 15	Floppy disk drive (800 K on Mac Plus)
> 20	Corvus Omnidrive (note: has 38 Kbaud bottleneck)
> 30	Pacer Via Kinetics Fastpath 3 to MicroVax II
> ~10	Mac Se <==(Localtalk)==> Mac II
> 		 <==(Northern Telecom's Meridian Lanstar @ 2Mb/sec)==> ?Server
...
>   However, the figures I have so far seem to indicate that _nobody_ saturates
> LocalTalk, and that the bottleneck may well be in the gateway.  There are
> rumours that Kinetics KFPS-4s are somewhat faster. 

	I've seen LocalTalk (thru a FastPath) run up to 18 Kbytes/second
(of "useful" data).  Needless to say, there is more to performance than just
the speed of the wire.  For example, block size, window size, etc., all
have a large effect.

	I just tried launching MacWrite:
 ~10	MacII via Kinetics Fastpath 4 to MacII server.
  ~5	MacII via Ethernet to MacII server.

	Possibly your Pacer connection is a bit slow as a result of process
switches on the MicroVax II?

Greg Minshall