[comp.sys.sun] Suitable Sparcstation 1 for X

nick@uunet.uu.net (Nicholas Jacobs) (12/15/89)

We are currently evaluating workstations, one of which is a Sparcstation
1.  Eventually we may want to run X windows on the machine and we are
concerned about a suitable configuration of hardware. One of the possible
configurations is a machine with 8 Mbytes and a single disk (~100 Mbytes)
for local swap and personal files for the user of the workstation.

Is this sufficient? Obviously, the more memory the better but we would
like to keep initial costs down. Please email me any responses.

Thanks in advance,
Nicholas Jacobs

jim@kanga.lcs.mit.edu (Jim Fulton) (01/03/90)

|We are currently evaluating workstations, one of which is a Sparcstation
|1.  Eventually we may want to run X windows on the machine and we are
|concerned about a suitable configuration of hardware.

MIT's R4 server (watch comp.windows.x for announcements) runs quite nicely
on a 16meg SPARCstation 1 with a vanilla cg3 8-bit framebuffer.  We
haven't tried it on an 8meg system, but since the server's working set is
much smaller than R3, it should pretty usable.

nick@uunet.uu.net (Nicholas Jacobs) (01/09/90)

In article <3982@brazos.Rice.edu> toro!nick@uunet.uu.net (Nicholas Jacobs) writes:
>X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 227, message 12 of 18
>
>We are currently evaluating workstations, one of which is a Sparcstation
>1.  Eventually we may want to run X windows on the machine and we are
>concerned about a suitable configuration of hardware.

I got several replies (about 7 or 8). The general (but not universal)
feeling seems to be that 8 Mbytes of memory is the bare minimum. Most
people seemed to think that 12 or 16 was better. A Sun rep. here in NYC
said that the unofficial policy is that if you want run X, you need to
have 16 Mbytes.

If people want copies of the summary, please feel free to email me.
Thanks again for your help,

Nicholas Jacobs
+-----------------------+----------------------------+----------------------+
| UUCP: uunet!toro!nick | Internet: nick@toro.uu.net | AT&T: (212) 236-3230 |
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mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau) (01/29/90)

jim@kanga.lcs.mit.edu (Jim Fulton) writes:
>MIT's R4 server (watch comp.windows.x for announcements) runs quite nicely
>on a 16meg SPARCstation 1 with a vanilla cg3 8-bit framebuffer.  We
>haven't tried it on an 8meg system...

I'm running it on an 8-meg color machine, and it's blindingly fast at most
operations.  (Interestingly enough, though, we've found in analyzing some
of our X11 programs that doing any graphics using a fill_style of
FillOpaqueStippled is *really* slow in the X11R4 compared to the Sun
OpenWindows server.  The MIT server doesn't seem to optimize the case
where the stipple is a "good" size, like 32 x 32 -- it just uses the fully
generic "fill anything with anything" code, which is slow.)

pop@sun.com (Steve Tufty) (01/30/90)

:>We are currently evaluating workstations, one of which is a Sparcstation
:>1.  Eventually we may want to run X windows on the machine and we are
:>concerned about a suitable configuration of hardware.
:
:I got several replies (about 7 or 8). The general (but not universal)
:feeling seems to be that 8 Mbytes of memory is the bare minimum. Most
:people seemed to think that 12 or 16 was better. A Sun rep. here in NYC
:said that the unofficial policy is that if you want run X, you need to
:have 16 Mbytes.

I was wondering what the recommended memory minimums would be for the
client and the server, providing that these processes are on different
machines.  My guess is that the client is the cpu hog.  Comments anyone?

Steve Tufty    (..!sun!cohesive!mercury!pop)