*BSD News Article 90916


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From: fastbit@earthlink.net
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: Re: no such thing as a "general user community"
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 1997 00:34:01 -0800
Organization: Earthlink Network, Inc.
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Matt Dillon wrote:

> 
>      * Modern single-cpu boxes running modern operating systems (p.s. NT is
>        not considered a modern operating system) are more then sufficient
>        to handle modern day I/O loads.  Our newsreader box, with 256MB
>        of ram and 250 reader processes and the disks going like hell,
>        have cpu's (pentium pro 200's) that are 80% idle.  80 fucking percent!
> 
>        What this means is that a single-cpu platform can generally saturate
>        whatever I/O you throw at it and still have plenty of suds left over.
> 

Matt,

I don't understand your analysis here.  If the CPU is idle and the disks
are going like crazy, it's not that the CPU is too fast -- it's the I/O
that's too slow.  What you want to do is to match the I/O to the CPU --
make the I/O fast enough to keep the CPU busy.  That translates into
more web-pages or email messages processed per unit of time. That's the
whole point of the O200 cc-NUMA architecture, hello ...