20 Nov
2012
20 Nov
'12
3:27 p.m.
On Nov 20, 2012, at 5:02 PM, Jules Richardson wrote:
I suppose it's so cheap these days that it makes no meaningful difference to the cost
of a device to give it 32KB or 32MB; may as well give it the larger value and offer a more
choice to the masses. There are probably cases of certain OSes refusing to run because the
host platform has _too much_ RAM, but I'm struggling to think of any right now.
I don't like bloat either, but I suppose the question is whether VMS would have
swollen equally if it existed with the same set of features as Linux does. In a
closed-source environment and with talented developers I expect it might be considerably
better, but still require vastly more resources than the VMS of years ago.
I should point out that it's still maintained. Someone
else would have to say how much it's bloated over the
last VAX-capable release, since I don't have any Alpha
or IA64 hardware to play on (yet). However, 7.3 runs
quite happily in its default install state on a 64 MB
SIMH emulation, and I could probably cut that down to
32 MB with little problem.
All the scalability numbers pointed out so far appear
to be roughly *equal* to VMS numbers of a decade ago,
and I can't imagine it's gotten worse. My assertion
isn't that VMS is always the best OS for the task (in
plenty of cases, it's not, and I'd actually love to
hear a list of things it's decidedly better for from
someone more experienced with it), but that it had
extremely good scalability way back when and can still
compete with the best Linux has to offer in terms of
scalability now.
The art _has_ moved on from when VMS was king of
scalability.
"Moved on" to the point that thinks 32M of RAM is "tiny"? There's the age-old question of where "the
OS" ends and "support programs" begins to consider too, I suppose.
Well, yeah. My impression (not having done loads of
Linux clustering) is that it's much easier to write
clustered applications in Linux than to utilize any
OS-level clustering support. But I may be entirely
off-base there, since it's not my domain.
- Dave