I don't feel it's fair to compare high-end RISC machines with
commodity Pentium PC's and then blame the OS for the lack of
responsiveness. I've had these moments of paranoia at SGI, where a
single Origin200 with a lowly 180 MHz CPU, 256MB of RAM and a couple
of SCSI disks would just eat up xterms, mail servers and mail clients
as fast as I could throw them at it, while a Linux box would roll over
and die after 15 minutes of that kind of load. However, this becomes
more understandable when you remember that an Origin200 class of
machine has 3 PCI buses, high-speed internal busless architecture
which gives it /dedicated/ 800MB/s between CPU and RAM, 1.6GB/s
between CPU's and 1.6GB/s to the I/O subsystem and all sorts of funky
CC-NUMA designs, while your PC, however fast the CPU, is sitting on
top of a sucking 133MB/s shared system PCI bus. So is IRIX better
than Linux? Nah, maybe it was while I was in SGI, but no more :-)
Linux certainly has it's limitations, but on comparable hardware it
outperforms most other OS's, specially when you throw gill bates'
babies into the ring.
Regards,
-- Raju
>>>>> "Shridhar" == Shridhar Daithankar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Shridhar> That's yes. Process scheduling and swap handling are
Shridhar> *the* areas that makes difference.
Shridhar> To add salt to the injury, the HP machine is 120MHz. OK
Shridhar> it has SCSI disk and mine has IBM IDE. But that should
Shridhar> be fair enough. Mine is PIII 450.
Shridhar> I can fork couple of telnets in less than couple of
Shridhar> seconds to the HP machine(with the help of NFS telnet
Shridhar> client which automatically loggs you in), when it's
Shridhar> walking with our product compilation(6 hours estimated)+
Shridhar> 3 Oracle databases. It has much more swap, 512 MB.
Shridhar> Under test of KDE compilation,linux machine never
Shridhar> touched swap. But it took me more than 5-7 seconds to
Shridhar> get output of free.
Shridhar> Admittedly HP handles swap much better. Besides
Shridhar> aggressive caching done by linux is harmful in such
Shridhar> cases. I think freeBSD is better resopinsive in such
Shridhar> cases, according to a review recently posted in eweek.
Shridhar> Bye Shridhar
Shridhar> On 13-Feb-2001 sreangsu acharyya wrote:
>> with same amount of RAM ? I guess the answers' is in how they
>> do the process scheduling and swaping. No idea about these
>> though.
--
Raju Mathur [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kandalaya.org/
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