hart@ml.csiro.au (Bill Hart) (03/22/91)
We have a SS2 GX with 6 labtam x terminals (1 colour) hanging off it (I imagine this would be equivalent to 8 or 9 mono x terminals). We have been running Open Windows 2.0 which is a bit of a memory pig, and the SS2 originally only had 16 MB in it. Since we added another 16 MB it seems to work pretty well. The machine is used for some fairly heavy computationally intensive work, and does ok (so long as you don't run out of memory) multiuser. It is a much more impressive machine for multiuser stuff than a SS1 or SS1+, (also much better than any of the IBM Risc offerings), as it has 16 hardware context switches (as opposed to 8 for a SS1 which makes them really bad for multi user stuff). Of course you could buy a 470 which has 64 context switches but costs much more. If you are going to buy one, my recommendation would be buy a 16" mono Sparcstation and add your own disk+ memory (I think you will find this is much cheaper I can buy 1.2 GB wren VII for ~$4000, and 4MB simms for ~$385) and stick as much memory on as you can. Make a very large tmpfs (use the "swap on /tmp" option) and increase the number of users specified in the kernel to 16 or 32. It might also be worth while considering buying NCD X terminals as they have the motif window manager built into the hardware (which saves a process etc...) if you want to run motif. Other alternatives are something based on a R3000A (I think the R4000 will be a while yet) from either Mips (Mips magnum) or from SGI. These should do the job quite nicely. If you want any more info, let me know Bill Hart Internet : hart@ocean.ml.csiro.au CSIRO Division of Oceanography Phone : +61 02 206 446 Hobart, Tas., 7000 Australia Fax : +61 02 240 530