Subject: Re: ballpark ratio users:cpu for a [345]86 NetBSD box? <[email-masked]>

From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>

Oh, and I forgot one other very important thing...

Dave McGuire says:
> But for how much money?  I can pick up a Sun4/470 for about
> US$2,000.00 right now, that I know from experience (I work for an
> Internet provider that sells shell accounts on Sun4/400-series
> systems) can readily handle 60 people with no problem.

Each Pentium is substantially more powerful than a 4/470 in every
respect. As importantly, however, a 4/470 is a monsterously large
machine compared to a Pentium and consumes far more power. I can stack
ten PCI based Pentium PCs in a 19 inch rack. You may laugh at this
consideration, but for those of us trying to run operations in places
like New York City where every square foot can cost truly astronimical
sums of money and where electricity is very expensive, this is a
serious consideration. Replacing stupid obsolete 4/470s and 4/490s
with stacks of far more powerful Sparcstations saved one client of
mine with a high floor datacenter in a prime real estate location more
than enough to pay for the conversion, and the machines were better,
too.

Perry

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From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>

Dave McGuire says:
>   That would most certainly be more reasonable...But the thing is...if
> you're gonna spend a buttload of money on new hardware, why not buy
> hardware that's designed to support lots of users in the first place?
> PCs are designed to give *great* performance to one person.  Big
> servers are designed to give *good* performance to a LOT of people.
[...]
> I can pick up a Sun4/470
> for about US$2,000.00 right now, that I know from experience (I work
> for an Internet provider that sells shell accounts on Sun4/400-series

Pardon, but a Pentium with a PCI bus has far better context switching,
far better IO, and far better speed. What is left that the Sun 4/470,
which was designed as a server, not as a multiuser machine (which is
why it has too few MMU contexts) can beat the Pentium machine on?

I can also pick one of those up in a reasonable configuration for
$2,000.

Its not quite the same O/S or application, but I'll note that
Compuserve has been successfully experimenting with hundreds of users
on single PCs running BSDI.

The main problem I could see with a NetBSD Pentium box right now is
that NetBSD won't max out the disk because the clustering stuff isn't
in yet. However, the hardware is as capable as anything you can
find. The Pentium is an UGLY chip in terms of instruction set, but the
notion that the machine can't compete is misplaced. Try a benchmark
before claiming otherwise.

Perry