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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!solace!nntp.uio.no!news.maxwell.syr.edu!EU.net!enews.sgi.com!news.corp.sgi.com!fido.asd.sgi.com!tilt.engr.sgi.com!rcc From: rcc@tilt.engr.sgi.com (Ray Chen) Newsgroups: 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: 30 Mar 1997 21:41:14 GMT Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA Lines: 83 Message-ID: <5hmmlq$3dk@fido.asd.sgi.com> References: <331BB7DD.28EC@net5.net> <333C1614.ABD@sgi01.grn.aera.com> <5hhv1k$jh9@fido.asd.sgi.com> <333E3530.794B@sgi01.grn.aera.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: tilt.engr.sgi.com Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:38077 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6511 comp.sys.sgi.misc:29531 In article <333E3530.794B@sgi01.grn.aera.com>, Lee Ward <lee@sgi01.grn.aera.com> wrote: >Larry McVoy wrote: >> Disks stripe stripe XFS BDS >> unit width read write read write >> 27 128k 3456k 99 64 72 35 >> >> And I can do that on a uniprocessor R10K system. I dunno what our disk >> prices are today, I'm sure they are too high in everyone except SGI's >> opinion, but suppose a disk costs $3K. That's about $90K in disks and >> mebbe $40K in system (should be cheaper but you need a hippi board and >> we charge for those). Hardly hundreds of thousands of dollars. >> > >So, what you are saying is that $130,000 isn't in the "hundreds"? Since >you don't seem to take a hint well, I'll say it plainly: you are >comparing a one-hundred thousand dollar machine to a 20,000 dollar >machine. You are using figures from that 100,000 dollar machine to argue >that someone should buy it or a cousin as a news server? Why? Let's be fair to Larry. If you look back at the original postings, he got on this because someone questioned the need for >500 MB/sec bandwidth. He said he had customers who not only needed that kind of bandwidth out of a system but needed that kind of bandwidth out of NFS and he was giving it to them. You didn't believe him and asked him to put up or shut up. He posted figures. Enough already. Clearly, with today's hardware, if you need that kind of bandwidth, you're going to pay some money. Just buying the number of drives required to sink or source data at those data rates will cost. No one claimed you need this kind of bandwidth for a new server unless you're running the news server from hell. I think Larry was trying to make the point that there are things that IRIX can do right now that current free unix'es can't do. And it's not just a matter of hardware. You could port Linux or your favorite free unix to an SGI SMP box and it still couldn't sustain the kind of I/O rates you can get on IRIX to the local filesystem or across a high bandwidth network like HIPPI using NFS+BDS. That's because the software's not there. A major goal of SGI OS software is to let the hardware do its stuff. This is hard work. We threw out an entire filesystem that was FFS-based because we didn't think we could beef it up enough to handle the hardware that we thought we'd be building. 4 years later, that looks like a good choice from here. Larry did BDS because high-bandwidth networking hardware became available and the NFS protocol wasn't capable of driving it at speed. And it's not just us. The folks working on the scheduler, VM, kernel synchronization primitives, networking stacks, etc. work just as hard as we do and for the same reason. The goal is to make the hardware the performance bottleneck, not the software. As the hardware gets bigger, better, and faster, the software has to keep up or it becomes the bottleneck. So if you can meet your needs with a 1-4 banger Intel box and are capable of hacking the OS to tune it to your needs, fine. Go for it. There are lots of people out there who will do just fine with an Intel box, PCI bus, and Linux or FreeBSD. But there are lots of people who need more than that. They run database back-ends, do data warehousing, compute seismic codes, run huge data farms, make movies, run telephone systems, etc. And for the folks who don't have the expertise or the desire to live as close to the OS, or who want to take advantage of certain capabilities of IRIX that we've paid lots of attention to, well, we're here for them too. An O200 running IRIX can do some things very very well :-). Ray Chen rcc@sgi.com