Hello, in my opinion (and experience) having a Plan 9 _grid_ is only really beneficial for larger networks (where there's a reason to have a separation for load balancing or maintenance reasons) or individuals who plan to build services with some scale. For others it's mainly playing around to learn those things or just because we can.
For example, a standard™ grid really shines with a good fileserver. I mean, it's the core of all your files and also the configuration of the other nodes in the machine. In an ideal setup you can just reboot an individual service node, or even replace it, and it just reboots using the kernel and configuration from the fileserver. Also consider multiple users: each one can have their own terminal with a full Plan 9 kernel that's directly connected with the fileserver. You get low latency when interacting with the local kernel (e.g when running applications), but somewhat higher latency accessing files (including starting programs, though you can work around that quite easily). Big benefits are, it doesn't matter which terminal you are on, you always get the same interface to your resources (files _and_ services inside the grid), but still maintaining good speed since everything is running locally. Well, not everything, since you can obviously off-load heavy tasks to the other servers inside your grid. Use your terminal as an interface, but do heavy tasks on big clunky machines in your network. That's just my thoughts. sirjofri ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Td6c4be6d8502dbd0-M4909fd69995720631c9cd88f Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
