Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!bzs From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: Vax 11/780 performance vs Sun 4/280 performance Message-ID: <23027@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Date: 31 May 88 23:48:10 GMT References: <14968@brl-adm.ARPA> <264@sdba.UUCP> Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci. Lines: 64 In-reply-to: stan@sdba.UUCP's message of 31 May 88 17:32:33 GMT Although I don't disagree with the original claim of Suns having knees (related to NeXT being pronounced Knee-zit? never mind) the discussion can lose sight of reality here. A 780 cost around $400K* and supported around 20 logins, a Sun4 or even Sun3/280 probably comes close to that in support for around 1/5 the price or less, and the CPU is much faster when a job gets it. If your Vax was horribly overloaded and had 32 users just buy more than one system and split the community, you'll also double the I/O paths that way and probably have at least one system up almost all the time (we NFS'd everything between our Suns in Math/Computer Science and Information Technology here so they can log into any of them although that does mean that if your home dir is on a down system you lose.) Also the cost of things like memory is so much lower that you can cheat like hell on getting performance. Who ever had a 32MB 780? That's practically a minimum config for a Sun4 server. The best use for a Sun server as a time-sharer is if a) you don't expect rapid growth in the number of logins (eg. doubling in a year) that will outgrow the machine and b) you expect a lot of the community using the system to migrate from dumb terminals to workstations in the reasonably near future, that way voila, you have the server, especially if each new workstation means one less time-sharer and it converges fairly rapidly. It's a nice way to give them time to get their financial act together to buy workstations. For example, for our CS and Math Faculty here having 3 servers worked out very well, many of the users have now grown into workstations and the server facilities were "just there". Another rationale of course is that you're looking for just a little system for perhaps a dozen or so peak load people, I don't know any system off-hand that can do that as nicely as a system like the above for the money. If your needs are much more in the domain of traditional time-sharing (eg. hordes of students that never ceases growing term to term, dumb terminals and staying that way for the next few years [typically, if you ever get them workstations you'll put an appropriate, separate, server in *that* budget]) then you probably want to look at something more expandable/upgradeable. I find Encores and (no direct experience but I hear good things) Sequents pretty close to perfect for that kind of usage. I'm sure there are others that will suffice but we don't use them so I can't comment (we have 7 Encores and over 100 Suns here.) Anyhow, seat-of-the-pants systems analysis on the net is probably a precarious thing at best, I hope I've pointed out the issues are several and small differences in two groups' needs can make any recommendation inapplicable. All I can say is we have quite a few Sun 3 servers here doing something resembling traditional time-sharing and everyone seems very happy with it. Given the right conditions it works out well, given the wrong ones no doubt it would be a nightmare, so what else is new? -Barry Shein, Boston University P.S. I have no vested interest in any of the above mentioned companies although I am on the Board of Directors of the Sun Users Group, I doubt that would be considered "vested". * Yes I realize that it's been almost 10 years since the 780 came out, but that was the original question.