20 Mar
2002
20 Mar
'02
1:51 p.m.
At 10:15 PM 3/20/02 -0500, Gunther Schadow wrote:
I'm certainly not complaining, just wondering and trying to
understand what exactly it is that made people pay
millions
of dollars for a harware that was only a few years later
outpaced by the poor man's desktop ...
It wasn't. It does thing that today's desktops can't do. When is the last
time you got 99.999% uptime out of a PC? Even though the theoretical
bandwidth of the PCI bus was 120+ MB/sec systems rarely achieved > 1 - 2
MB/sec sustained throughput.
... ... now, I don't
know that yet, I actually don't believe it. I still suspect
that once the bottlenecks are uncovered, I can find
workarounds to coerce more of the idle hardware into working.
Always true. Unlike the PC there are knobs for making things faster on the VAX.
For instance, calling GNU make with the -j option and
calling gcc with the -pipe option appears to create a
lot more CPU load:
cpu us% ni% sy% id% csw sys trap intr ipi ttyin
ttyout
1 30.3 0.0 6.4
63.2 89k 288k 300k 218k 13 3k 190k
2 22.4 0.0 1.4
76.2 27k 84k 74k 0 24 481 22k
3 20.5 0.0 1.4
78.1 28k 80k 70k 0 13 526 17k
4 23.1 0.0 1.5
75.4 28k 86k 74k 0 25 531 23k
5 21.2 0.0 1.5
77.3 29k 88k 72k 0 25 550 19k
6 19.5 0.0 1.5
79.1 29k 86k 73k 0 26 600 25k
that looks better, at least the others are not
97% idle now.
Doing a parallel make would be even faster.
--Chuck