VAX vs. Alpha for OpenVMS

From: Antonio Carlini <arcarlini_at_iee.org>
Date: Thu May 22 11:17:01 2003

> A co-worker of mine just bought a VAXstation 4000/90 and a
> DEC 3000/400. She wants to use one of them as a Mail Server
> running OpenVMS. The VAX looks to have 104MB, the Alpha
> looks to only have 96MB. Any idea on which would work best
> for her? Part of what has me concerned is the lack of RAM on

I suspect that either would work. I run a VS4000-90A here
at home and it hums along quite nicely doing the odd compile
and running a web server. If I let the your hordes get to
the webserver I suspect the connection would die well
before the VAX!

The Alpha will be perhaps 2-3 times faster (at least
going by the SPEC numbers I can find for related
models and guessing a little based on frequencies).

104MB is certainly enough for the VAX to happily function
as a workstation - the additional cpu and memory load
from a webserver and mail server will be negligible
- at least for home use, I'd not plan on running a
large enterprise based on this! I forget exactly what kind of
memory the DEC 3000 took, but it's probably cheap enough
on ebay these days that it can be maxed out
if it's a problem.

Either OpenVMS or NetBSD would probably be fine for
this usage (although be sure to get the NetBSD 1.6
or so that fixed the non-fatal overwriting of
part of the console flash ... I think it was the
VS4000-9x that was hit).

I use the OSU webserver under OpenVMS and Apache
under Solaris. As a single user I'm unable to
cause either to die under load :-)

Antonio
 
-- 
---------------
Antonio Carlini             arcarlini_at_iee.org
Received on Thu May 22 2003 - 11:17:01 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:36:16 BST