🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <549@torsqnt.UUCP> david@torsqnt.UUCP (David Haynes) writes:

>However, a little time ago a program called 'dclock' was posted to the
>X sources newsgroup and nearly everyone compiled and ran this program.
>It had a neat digital display that slowly scrolled the numbers whenever
>the hours or minutes changed. Now, whenever the hour changed the centralized
>system supporting the users just *crawled* along. It turns out that the
>network traffic generated by the smooth scrolling of the numbers was
>horrific and that the network was getting saturated. This tends to argue 
>that some applications are best left on a dedicated workstation.
>
>Naturally, intelligent workstations with a large centralized server would
>be ideal, but other considerations (cost, data security, backup, software
>maintenance, ...) also come into play. This leads nicely into the observations
>that Rayan was making in his articles.

Well, actually, I think there is a much more cost-effective technology for
this: it's far more distributed than any other choice; it has zero impact
on the network or central site; it is reliable; some releases include small
calculator functions and useful alarms; fonts and such are trivially chosen
by the user; it has portability than an X-terminal.




It's called a wristwatch.....

-----
More seriosuly, this does illustate that sometimes, when one trades
a centralized environment [minicomputer plus ASCII terminals] for a more
distributed one [workstations or PCs], you're kidding yourself if you
think the network isn't a central resource, and that it is HARDER to
manage than a simpler big machine.  [This is not an argument for
central machines, just an observation that one must have a clear view of
reality.]  If work can be done on an isolated machine, that's fine,
but people in organizations want to share data, and now at least part
of the system is a shared resource that needs sensible management, not
anarchy.  There's nothing that brings this home like having an Ethernet
board go crazy and start trashing a net, and have to shut everything
down, one at a time, to find it, belying the "if my system goes down,
it doesn't bother anybody" model.

How about getting this off the sociology track [because most of it came
down to "I know good compcenters" vs "I don't], and consider some of
the interesting system architectural issues, like:

1) How much load do X-window terminals put on a a host?
2) How much load do diskless nodes put on a host?
3) If the people are doing the same kind of work, does the host do more
or less disk I/O in cases 1) or 2)?  How does the Ethernet traffic differ?
4) Experiences with X-window terminals: how many can be served, doing what
kind of work, from what kind of host?
5) How do you characterize the kinds of work that people do in any of
these environments?

I'd be interested in data on any of these, as I think would many.
(MIPS is neutral, of course, since we actively sell multi-user systems
with ASCII terminals, servers, workstations, and X-window terminals,
we probably have less axes to grind than many people;
people here use a mixture of: X-window terminals, ASCII terminals,
MIPS workstations, MACS, DECstations, Suns, Apollos, and PCs as makes
sense them, NFSed with 400+ VUPS worth of servers.  Distributed systems are
wonderful:thank goodness the people who centrally wadminister this are great..)
-- 
-john mashey	DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak for me only, etc>
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