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On Wed, 10 May 1995, Doug Burnett wrote:

> I like a the idea of starting out small with a growth plan.  What I'm
> struggling with is how much can we do on a PC/UNIX machine.  I don't even
> know what units of measurement to use here but I know we don't want to 
> start web publish grossly underpowered.... 

In terms of processor speed, a Pentium/100 is faster than a 3090/200 
mainframe.  It's twice as fast as they Cray 1.  CPU cycles isn't the 
issue.  The bottlenecks come from the Communications link and the Disk 
drives.  It takes about 9 milliseconds for a 3" drive too make one 
revolution.  It takes about 1 millisecond to push 1 byte through the 
14,400 modem.  On an ethernet link, with a 9ms disk drive, and nothing 
else going on, a simple file transfer can be throttled back to 8Kb/second 
if the scheduling is done wrong.

Using SCSI instead of IDE, and multiple SCSI cards instead of only one 
daisy chain, and using FAST SCSI with detached requests (let's the 
operating system que many at the same time) and having an operating 
system that optimizes the requests it makes to the disks, and doing 
read-aheads for sequential accesses...  All features of UNIX which appear 
to be missing in NT.

> Doug
> 
> On Tue, 9 May 1995, Rex Ballard wrote:

	Rex Ballard
	Standard & Poor's/McGraw-Hill
	Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect
	the Management of the McGraw-Hill Companies.




From rballard@cnj.digex.net Thu May 11 17:43:14 1995