24 Feb
2003
24 Feb
'03
8:28 a.m.
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Zane H. Healy wrote:
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.
I did some not-horribly-scientific testing on my MVIII around that.
Local disk-to-disk transfers (in NetBSD) are *much* slower than NFS-NFS
operations, even when the NFS fs were on 2 different machines, and
memory-intensive operations (starting an X desktop with fvwm for remote
display) were about 15% faster *without* local swap.
I recognize the possibility that the NetBSD drivers may have a lot to
do with that, but my VMS skills are not up to setting up that kind of
benchmarks.
This was all on a KA-650 CPU, 13MB RAM, RQDX3 w/RD54, and a DEQNA
ethernet board. I used a 16MB swap file on the NFS server.
Doc