Newsgroups: ont.uucp
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Is it time for a "uunet-north"? 
Message-ID: <1990Feb6.171326.15603@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <90Feb5.222929est.827@church.csri.toronto.edu>
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 90 17:13:26 GMT

In article <90Feb5.222929est.827@church.csri.toronto.edu> moraes@csri.toronto.edu (Mark Moraes) writes:
>+ a powerful CPU. (handling a full feed of news can cripple
>anything under a Sun3/180 without much effort right now)

When people say things like this, I can't help remembering that our poor
old pdp11/44, running C News, was still functioning quite well -- passing
a full feed to half a dozen other sites -- when we set it aside in favor
of a 3/180 a year and a half ago.  Volume has grown since then, yes, but
it still looks to me like disk bandwidth and good serial i/o are much more
important than CPU crunch.  The apparent importance of CPU speed is mostly,
I think, because small CPUs tend to come with slow disks and cruddy serial
ports.  (The old utzoo had Eagles on a very good controller, probably
better than the one on our Sun.  It also had Emulex DHs for terminal
multiplexors, and those make Sun's ALMs look like the crap they are.
I'm still disgusted that a 3/180 can't run a 2400-baud uucp line at full
speed -- the 44 could.)  Forget the CPU; it's the peripherals that matter
for this application.
-- 
SVR4:  every feature you ever |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
wanted, and plenty you didn't.| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu