sjc@CURLY.ITI.ORG (Steven J. Clark) (07/13/90)
A while back (almost two years ago) I was looking for the best cost/performance
I could get for Medley on a Sun, and the guys at Envos gave me some rough
estimates. Here is what I can dig up:
Sun 3/60 with 12Mb ~= 1.0 * speed of 1186, but Sun has better swapping
3/160 12Mb ~= 0.8
3/260 8 Mb ~= 1.5
4/110 8 Mb ~= 2.0
4/260 8 Mb ~= 5 to 10 times an 1186
We went with 4/110's that use the disk of a 3/160 across the ethernet, and
we get pretty good performance except when doing disk accesses. We don't
get a much paging, but when we do it's pretty slow.
Presumably the guys at Envos were not motivated to warp the truth since
we were already committed to buying the software and they were not selling
Sun hardware. However, these estimates were of overall performance,
including swapping - not just CPU power.
Hope this is helpful.
-Steve