10 Sep
2012
10 Sep
'12
12:53 p.m.
On 10 September 2012 14:36, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
Many years later, running a VAX network in the mid-1990s, I was amazed
to discover that VMS did not include a disk cache. It was a
/seriously/ expensive extra - thousands of pounds - but batch
performance went through the roof when I tried a time-limited demo of
one. We bought it PDQ.
Mmmm... "prestoserve".
Battery backed up ram for speeding up sync disk writes, typically on a
DECstation or Sun Sparc box. Handy for general use, but quite awesome
for NFS.
Of course SGI provided fast NFS servers by just lying to the client
and saying sync writes had hit disk as soon as it was in (non backed
up) memory cache. That was a *whole* heap of fun at $PREVIOUS_JOB when
the O2000 servers decided to panic every few hours due to buggy Fore
system ATM drivers - that 1GB of asset data the 300 workstations think
was safely written back? Well, I hope you like nulls...