halb@midway.uchicago.edu (Hal Bloom) (03/28/91)
Many thanks to those who responded to the following query: I'm interested in whether anyone has had experience using a SPARCserver 2 as a multiuser system. The intended use for the system would be reading news, reading mail, and the editing associated with such tasks. There would most likely be 24-30 simultaneous users. Could a SPARCserver 2 with adequate memory handle this type of load? How much memory would one want? I received three respones from people who were running a SPARC2 as a multiuser system. The basic summary is that a SPARC2 should be more than adequate for my needs. Excerpts from the reponses follow: X-From Ric Anderson ( ric@cs.arizona.edu): We just got an SS2 to replace an aging Vax-8650 as a general cycle server, mail reading place, and news reading place for those who don't have access to workstations in our department. We put 64MB RAM in it, the 207MB Sun internal disk, and a Sun S-Bus SCSI controller. We then got 4 Fuji 2266SA disks from R-Squared, which provide an 885MB C partition (that's used+avail, as opposed to "kbytes" which is 983983). I put 2 of the fuji's on the internal scsi controller, and two on the S-bus one. This machine is our central mail/news machine, and seems to run quite well. It also supports nntp news readers from other workstations, and exports a filesystem for one of our researchers who bought the 4th disk with his grant. So far, i've seend 27 people at most on the machine. X-From: ira@cis.upenn.edu (Ira Winston) We use a Sparcserver 2 with 64mb, 3x669mb disks, 1x207mb disk, 2.2gb tape and CDROM drive as a timesharing machine for 30-40 simultaneous users running mail, news, emacs and tex. The machine is also our primary nameserver and mail relay. most of the users accessing it have NCD X-terminals. This machine replaced a 4/280 with 48mb and 2gb of SMD disk. The Sparcserver 2 handles the load that was starting to be a problem on the 4/280. Furthermore, tex runs 2-3 faster. X-From: beauchem@DMI.USherb.CA (Denis Beauchemin) Though I didn't have any experiences with a 330, I can tell you that our SS2 currently supports around 12 programmers day long. They produce Informix stuff (with lots of cc and SQL queries). They are connected through an Annex II terminal server. The console is used in OpenWin (by me) all day long also. The machine has 32 MB RAM and it is enough for our purposes. The response time is excellent. Looks like to me that your needs (news, mail and the like) are less demanding than ours so it would be quite reasonable to support 24-30 users on the system. END of Summary (and thanks again to all who responded) Hal Bloom Manager of Sites, Systems and Network Services Academic and Public Computing halb@midway.uchicago.edu University of Chicago Computing Organizations