VAX 6460 being slow, IO bottlenecks and SMP woes ...

From: Allison <ajp166_at_bellatlantic.net>
Date: Thu Mar 21 07:49:44 2002

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>

>Not counting an eight-hour power failure, one of my PC-based servers
>has had under two minutes of unscheduled downtime in seven years of
>24x7 operation. That's better than 99.9999%.
>
>Of course, it's not running Windows.

I have winder boxen that do that as servers. As desktops forget it, Word
dies and takes the OS at times. Never seen that on VMS.

>I don't know what systems those were, but my first 486 PCI system
>routinely got sustained PCI throughput of over 15 MB/second, between
>disk, ethernet, and display.

and the processor was doing something useful?

>Even many ISA bus systems could sustain over 4 MB/second.

Yes, it could. Shame the CPU was idle or doing just the block move.

I've seen Qbus systems (PDP-11) sustain levels like that but, the
CPU was useful.

PCs, and their busses didn't allow for concurrentcy of operations
especially ISA.

Allison
Received on Thu Mar 21 2002 - 07:49:44 GMT