[comp.sys.ibm.pc] RPC for PC/AT

tobbe@isy.liu.se (Torbjorn Kronander) (02/13/89)

Does anyone kwow of a PC/AT implementation of SUN's RPC protocol.
The only such I am aware of is SUN's own product which is 
ridiculously slow.

Torbjorn Kronander
Dept of EE
Linkoping University
Sweden


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Torbj|rn Kronander

jbvb@ftp.COM (James Van Bokkelen) (02/16/89)

In article <1989Feb12.201801.1304@isy.liu.se>, tobbe@isy.liu.se (Torbjorn Kronander) writes:
> Does anyone kwow of a PC/AT implementation of SUN's RPC protocol.
> The only such I am aware of is SUN's own product which is 
> ridiculously slow.

UDP is a light-weight protocol.  Acks, flow-control and the like are assumed
to be handled by the application, not by UDP.  Sun's RPC over UDP assumes it
is on a high-speed local LAN link, so it suffers greatly when there is any
significant packet loss (and corrupts user data if any packets arrive damaged,
but not destroyed, because they don't use end-to-end UDP checksums).

Any UDP-based use of Sun's RPC on PCs is going to be fairly slow at moving
data, because the PC's interface won't be as fast as the servers, so packets
will be lost, requiring many retries.  If you avoid retries by moving data in
small increments, you will waste a lot of time on overhead.

Try using RPC over TCP, instead.  Arcane knowlege is required to make a TCP
that runs fast on a PC, but it is at least possible (we go 1Mbit/sec or
greater on raw TCP, depending on the interface - I don't know how Sun does).
Our Developer's Kit will have an RPC library added sometime later this year,
but I haven't done speed tests with the extra layering.


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