19.2K on a 3b1

[Karl Swartz]

In article <2214 at public.BTR.COM> thad at public.BTR.COM (Thaddeus P. Floryan) writes:
>... there's no "standard" software for the 3B1 that
>will correctly support hardware flow control and 19,200 baud.

>And before you say bullsh*t, please note that I've spent HUNDREDS of hours
>testing this ...

Duly noted.  And while your pedantic interpretation may well be
correct, in practice your answer is bullshit.  My 3b1 has spent
hundreds of hours just this month demonstrating otherwise.

>Even WITH hardware flow control, I've been forced to run my Telebit
>2500 locked at an interface speed of 9600 baud to assure reliable
>data exchange.

Funny, my TrailBlazer Plus, still with creaky old 4.00 ROMs, has been
running just fine with hardware flow control and an interface locked
at 19,200 for several *years* now.  Currently traffic levels are near
three-quarters of a *gigabyte* per month with nary a trace of data
loss.  (There may be an occasional HFC hiccup but uucp's g protocol
obviously deals with it and even at that the data rates show minimal
impact from retries.  HDB uucp, BTW, not the stock garbage.)

>For the record, at 19200 baud and HDB UUCP, my send rate would be 1800+ and
>my receive rate would be 75 cps.  Yes, 75 cps, due to retransmission delays.
>At 9600 baud, I both send/receive around 870 cps.  Both cases with HFC and
>the same Telebit T2500 modem whose only change is the serial data rate.

For the record, I happen to have some numbers for Tuesday of last
week, an entirely ordinary day for ditka with respect to uucp.  That
day a total of 24 megabytes was transferred in and out over the modem
in just over 7 hours.  Outbound traffic outweighed inbound by about
1.24 to 1 and these numbers include a non-trivial amount a 2400 baud
traffic (perhaps even a trace of 1200) along with some PC Pursuit in
addition to Telebit (PEP) links.  Despite all that when one accounts
for g-protocol packet overhead the *average* rate is over 1,000 bytes
per second.

Ok, the numbers came from xferstats and there's known slop there on
small files.  But the average file size was 36K so most of the slop
should be down in the noise.

Still not convinced?  Try this: the report was for a 24 hour period.
If I were getting only 75 cps on input, the input alone (never mind
the 13.5 megabytes of output) would have required over 40 hours.

>More later ... enough rambling for now

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit,
eh Thad?  You undoubtedly have provided a lot of help to numerous
UNIX PC owners, but when I read nonsense like this (unfortunately not
unique to this occasion) I really have to wonder.

-- 
Karl Swartz		|INet	kls at ditka.chicago.com
1-408/223-1308		|UUCP	{uunet,decwrl}!daver!ditka!kls
			|Snail	1738 Deer Creek Ct., San Jose CA 95148
"It's psychosomatic.  You need a lobotomy.  I'll get a saw." (Calvin)