Price of comparable high-end PC vs. Sun SLC

[fredc at umrisca.isc.umr.edu]

In article <1990Sep4.232304.16861 at rice.edu> oliveau at cs.ucla.edu
(Greg Oliveau) writes:
>Apparently you can hook up around 20 SLC's to a single disk (or SLC
>server) and not see significant performance degredation depending on what
>you do - this of course was from a Sun salesman!

I saw a system set up like this (DACNet at the Design Automation
Conference), and it was trash!  The reason: when you are running Open
Windows, an 8M SLC will thrash memory.  Put twenty of those running swap
off the same disk and you have a disaster.  If you run any windowing
system at all, anything with a local disk for swap will outperform a
diskless node with the same amount of real memory, unless that amount
happens to be large enough to avoid swapping altogether.  I have found
that I tend to use up whatever real memory is there by enhancing my basic
layout, so I'll never have enough real memory to do that :-)

An aside: Sun was there in force at DAC, knew about the mess called
DACNet, yet they made no attempts to remedy the problem.  I thought that
such negligence shows a remarkable arrogance, not unlike another 3-letter
company we all love to hate.

Fred Clauss                  INTERNET:  fredc at isc.umr.edu (preferred)
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