I would start looking at GE for servers if I were trying to come up with a
"superserver" that did file sharing for a large number of client systems
(like, 500+). Not just ANY file sharing - massive, relentless file sharing.
I'm talking about a situation where I'd be running all my apps and parts of
my client OS out of server shares/mounts and having everyone blowing
250MB-plus files all over the place all day long. All clients would be on
switched Fast Ethernet and all the switches would have GE uplinks (insert
Tim-Allen-style WOOF WOOF WOOF here). All the clients would be PIIIs or
K7s. The server would have some obscene amount of RAM in it, mostly for the
sake of cache. I might break it up into two servers - one for little stuff
and one for big stuff, since one big file would blow a lot of little files
out of cache and take away a lot of my cache advantage.
I recall reading (and I suppose this is still true today) that if you have a
really good network and really good servers that are intelligently set up,
client machines can launch apps stored on servers faster than they can get
them out of their own hard drives.
If I were really trying to kick some A along those lines, I might use cron
to copy app images and related files to /dev/null every so often in an
effort to keep them in cache. Of course, in a busy 500-client outfit, I'd
expect that something like Netscape would likely be in cache just about all
the time and a cron job to keep it there would be overkill. I wish there
were a utility that would let you keep an eye on cached files.
So it really isn't all that important if there aren't drives that could keep
up with GE - the issue is, can disk cache keep up with GE?
- Jeff
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Fowler [mailto:">chrisf@computone.com]
> Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2000 7:02 AM
> To: '">Eric.Ayers@mindspring.com'
> Cc: '">ale@ale.org'
> Subject: RE: [ale] Gigabit cards
>
>
> So in which scenario would one of these cards be an valuable
> asset? If the
> pipe is that big can I move data through it at that rate?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Z. Ayers [mailto:">eric.ayers@mindspring.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2000 11:01 PM
> To: Jeff Hubbs
> Cc: Chris Fowler; '">ale@ale.org'
> Subject: RE: [ale] Gigabit cards
>
>
>
> The speed of the bus is 33mHz
> The width of PCI is 32 bits
> 33 * 32 = 1056 bits/second
> (1056 bits/second) / (8 bytes/bit) = 132 Megabytes/second
>
> So, the theoretical maximum throughput of PCI is 132 Mbytes/second.
>
>
> Jeff Hubbs writes:
> > I hope this answer isn't so wrong as to make me look
> stupid (hm, why
> shoudl
> > THAT bother me??), but isn't the PCI bus parallel, i.e.,
> 132 MWORDS/sec
> (is
> > it 32-bit words?)? Ethernet cards serialize this, so I'd
> expect that the
> > PCI bus is probably a little more than enough to get a gigaBIT/sec
> through.
> >
> >
> > - Jeff
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Chris Fowler [mailto:">chrisf@computone.com]
> > > Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2000 5:17 PM
> > > To: '">ale@ale.org'
> > > Subject: [ale] Gigabit cards
> > >
> > >
> > > How can I get a gigit through a PCI card when the bus is
> > > capable of only 132
> > > megabits?
> > >
> > > Chris
> > > --
> > > To unsubscribe: mail ">majordomo@ale.org with "unsubscribe ale"
> > > in message body.
> > >
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