Re: [9fans] GCC3.0 [Was; Webbrowser]

[David Presotto <presotto@closedmind.org>]

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I was under the impression that Dong and I had fixed the TCP problems LANL was
having.  Is this incorrect?  Could you tell me what's still slow?  I really
do want our IP stack to stay competative.  Our next move is to take advantage
of the hardware checksuming on the gigabit boards since, in our most recent
testing, we seem to differ from BSD speeds most because of that.

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From: "Ronald G. Minnich" <rminnich@lanl.gov>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] GCC3.0 [Was; Webbrowser]
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2003 11:07:13 -0700 (MST)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0302061047570.11322-100000@carotid.ccs.lanl.gov>

On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Sam wrote:

> I just don't understand what you conceive as "slow."

Well, on Pink, a 1024-node cluster we just built here, I can fire up a
command to 1024 nodes from start to completion in < 4 seconds, and we
consider that slow. Lest you think this a worthless benchmark I can tell
you that startup overhead matters when scaling to this size system. My
hunch is that Plan 9 would not start up quite this fast. But that is only
based on very limited experience with 'cpu'.

But you are correct in that I am not being specific. Sadly, my impressions
are based on work done here last summer measuring TCP etc., and Andrey
knows way better than I what the outcome of that was.

However that doesn't much matter; what I'm taking from this discussion is
that most Plan 9 users, who are developers not end-users, are satisfied
with the performance of the system as is and see no need to try to make it
competitive with the *nux* breeds. Given the overall far better quality of
Plan 9 as an OS I find that understandable.

That said, I did think David Butler's remarks were pretty interesting.

Thanks

ron
p.s. What I really want to know: is Google going to run Plan 9 :-)