Are fileservers a waste of money

[David L. Kensiski 929-8844]

In SunSpots v7 n261 (25 April 89), munnari!trlamct.oz.au!paul at uunet.uu.net
(Paul Elliott) said:

> We will be adding some extra clients over the next few months and wish to
> upgrade the existing hardware and/or buy a more powerful server.
> 
> What we would like to know is where to spend the money.

Options 3 (upgrading the [RAM on the] 3/50s) and 4 (providing local SCSI
disks), which is actually option 5 (some combination of the above), would
probably net you the biggest change in system performance.

My experience with SunOS 4.0 is that you want more than 4 MB of RAM on
your workstation, especially if you use suntools.  Upgrading the RAM on
the 3/50s would reduce the number of page faults you will receive, keeping
you from swapping as much.  Sun doesn't provide RAM upgrades to 3/50s, but
there are a number of third party vendors that do.  I recently read that
Helios offers a RAM upgrade that does not require soldering to the CPU,
hence it does not invalidate the Sun warranty or service contract.

Local SCSI disks will keep any swapping that does happen off the network.
A small disk is all you need if you install a dataless configuration - 50
MB should do fine.  In a former life, all of our 3/50s had local SCSI
disks, ranging from 70 to 300 MB.  The 20 to 30 MB partitions left after
putting root and swap on the 70 MB disks was basically worthless - you
could put man pages or emacs source on it, but you wouldn't want much more
since, in my opinion, 3/50s don't make good file servers.

David L. Kensiski                          1772 Tribute Road
Martin Marietta Data Systems               Sacramento, CA 95815
UUCP: uunet.uu.com!mmsac!david             VOICE: (916) 929-8844
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