12 Mar
2023
12 Mar
'23
2:32 a.m.
On Thu, Mar 9, 2023 at 3:09 PM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 09, 2023 at 02:55:44PM -0500, Dan Cross
wrote:
Oh for sure I wouldn't try it on a VAX or PDP-11. I'm a bit surprised
by the SGI thing, to be honest, but only a bit: as you say, I think
that was just before the big push to make Unix really scalable.
On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 8:22???PM John Cowan
<cowan(a)ccil.org> wrote:
The early Unix code really did not like stuff like this. Lots of linear
scans through what were assumed to be short lists. I still remember an
SGI Challenge being brought to it's knees by a bunch of racks of modems.
The same machine could move a ton of data but not when it was being
forced through a zillion sockets. On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 2:53???PM Dan Cross
<crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not going to claim it would be zippy, but I do think it would work
acceptably.
Suppose that 1000 users telnet'ed into the x86 machine, but remained
essentially idle; what resources would that consume? We'd have 1000
open TCP connections, a thousand shell processes, a thousand
telnetd's, etc. But the
3090 was really more like a distributed system than the Athlon box
was, with all sorts of offload capabilities. For that matter, a
thousand users probably _could_ telnet into the Athlon system. With
telnet in line mode, it'd probably even be decently responsive.
I find that difficult to believe. It seems too high by an order of magnitude. Linux seems well past that problem but it's
possible that back in the
Athlon days it still sucked. I pinged Linus, if he remembers when the
kernel got taught to scale on sockets I'll report back.
Thanks, I'm curious what he says.
- Dan C.