Multiport I/O cards: intelligent or dumb?

[Larry Snyder]

root at equinox.UUCP (Super user) writes:

>IMHO, with the number of lines you have (two with plans to expand to four),
>a dumb serial card should fit your needs. Of course, if money isn't an
>object, get a smart card (suchas the...oh skip it...).

not if the ports are all locked at 38400 - plus - the overhead
associated with those speeds will slow the system down..

We did run multiple dumb ports - and throughput was reasonable -
but the system seemed sluggush - and throughput for console IO
tasks under X were quite slow.  After adding a smartboard, 
the throughput on the serial lines increased around 15% but the
console IO was real fast.  The sluggush response problems also
ceased.

-- 
      Larry Snyder, NSTAR Public Access Unix 219-289-0287/317-251-7391
                         HST/PEP/V.32/v.32bis/v.42bis 
                        regional UUCP mapping coordinator 
               {larry at nstar.rn.com, ..!uunet!nstar.rn.com!larry}