Miserable Async Perfomance ? - Use a terminal server!

[William Westfield]

For people depressed by the high load inflicted on their CPUs by ALM async
cards, I suggest that you consider a TCP Terminal Server as an
alternative.  Using a terminal server, you pay a little more for input
(you go from per-character to per-packet interrupts, and most input
packets only have one character), but you win quite a bit on output (still
interrupt/packet, but now a packet can have > 1000 bytes in it).  Things
will get even better as Sun and Terminal server vendors implement things
like "line mode telnet".

An added advantage is that the terminal server treats all suns on the net
equally, so that THE SUN WITH DIALUPs is not unduly loaded by people whoc
really want to use some other machine.

Terminal servers usually come in size ranging from 8 to 32 lines, and are
available from many vendors.  Prices in general are somewhat more
expensive than ALM boards for small terminal servers, and somewhat cheaper
than ALM boards for the larger terminal servers.  Our company, cisco
Systems, builds such beasts ranging in size from 10 lines to 96 lines, and
of course they are better than anyone elses :-).

Bill Westfield
cisco Systems.
415 326-1941