24 Feb
2003
24 Feb
'03
12:15 p.m.
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Zane H. Healy wrote:
Doc wrote:
Now that I agree with - my 3100s do a *lot* better with local swap,
and a little better with a local system disk.
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Zane H. Healy wrote:
That's interesting. I'd really not taken the slowness of the MFM disks into
account. It also makes a certain sense. Besides come to think of it, that
"standard wisdom" is generally applied to VAXstation 3100 or 4000 class
systems. Though I've been known to recommend booting a VAX 6000 class
system off of a VAXstation 4000/vlc. By a remote disk, I assume you're talking
about a 3.5" SCSI disk sitting in
a remote VMS or *BSD box? In such a configuration you still should (if
possible) have a local swap disk.
I know that's the standard wisdom, but the read/write speeds of all
the MFM disks I've tried on my RQDX3s are significantly slower than
network reads and writes. You're making me wish I could give this a try
under VMS. I wonder where on
earth I've got my pair of RD54's stashed. I know where everything else is
that would be required to temporarily switch a PDP-11 over to a MicroVAX II.
It would make for some interesting testing, and I've been wanting to us a
MicroVAX II to practice my system tuning skills (improvements are more
noticable on a MVII).
I'd be quite interested to know what you find. I'm not willing to
discount inefficient drivers on the NetBSD side, but just the published
transfer rates for the MFM disks, let alone seek times, suggest that on
a decently configured network, local storage will be slower than NFS.
Doc