🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5314@spool.cs.wisc.edu> planting@speedy.cs.wisc.edu (W. Harry Plantinga) writes:
>Let me see if I have this straight.  The mac II hardware (without DMA)
>is capable of reading data off the hard disk at 512Kb/sec, compared to
>the sun 3/50 (with DMA), which reads data at 240Kb/sec?

This is apples and oranges (Apples and Sun-sets?) because the 512KB/s was
"best case", i.e. "an unfragmented 8+ Megabyte file", while the Sun number
is "typical", i.e. a benchmark designed to be representative of the
typical state of a real system.  Also the Mac was running Mac OS, not UNIX,
and the file might have been in the top-level of the disk, thus avoiding
any HFS overhead.  Without more info the number is intriguing but
inconclusive.

Also, buffer size *can* have an immense impact on performance, but it
always has an effect on memory usage as well.  Imagine 20 files open
with a 32KB buffer for each - that's 640KB just for file buffers.  Not a
big problem in an 8 MB machine, but on a 1MB or 2MB machine?

-- 
	Howard A. Landman
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