talley@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (James T. Talley) (01/25/91)
I have some questions about adding a cache card to a Mac IIci running A/UX 2.0. The Mac IIci in question has 8 meg of RAM, 80 meg internal and 40 meg external hard drives. It will primarily be a network database/mail server. In other words, no one will be using Macish applications on the console on a regular basis. The questions are: 1) Is it worth adding a cache card? Will it enhance the speed of operation significantly for A/UX applications? 2) How hard is it to install? Do I just plug it in? Will I have to run newconfig? Do I have to start hacking the kernel with a hex binary editor? (Just kidding. :-) 3) Does anyone have any recommendations on a particular brand? Shall I just buy Apple's? Any info will be appreciated James T. Talley talley+@osu.edu
liam@cs.qmw.ac.uk (William Roberts;) (01/25/91)
In <1991Jan24.233305.13194@magnus.ircc.ohio-state.edu> talley@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (James T. Talley) writes: >I have some questions about adding a cache card to a Mac IIci >running A/UX 2.0. The Mac IIci in question has 8 meg of RAM, 80 >meg internal and 40 meg external hard drives. It will primarily >be a network database/mail server. In other words, no one will >be using Macish applications on the console on a regular basis. >1) Is it worth adding a cache card? Will it enhance the speed of > operation significantly for A/UX applications? A cache card will improve the performance of any program which executes smallish loops: an experiment I did with an early version of a cache card showed that the IIci with a cache card improved the performance of the Dhrystone benchmark significantly: it took the version compiled with A/UX cc and no register hints up to the performance of the A/UX cc version compiled with register hints (the gcc improvement was even better, though gcc deduces the register allocation all by itself without needing the hints). How useful it will be if you have no compute intensive applications is hard to say: the network database server might benefit from faster instruction execution if the tables it searches live largely in memory. >2) How hard is it to install? Do I just plug it in? Will I have > to run newconfig? Do I have to start hacking the kernel with a > hex binary editor? (Just kidding. :-) It is almost certainly transparent: A/UX already knows about 680x0 cache control. >3) Does anyone have any recommendations on a particular brand? > Shall I just buy Apple's? Buy one you can try out without a commitment to purchase: get the whole system working anyway and see if plugging in the cache card appears to make it go faster. -- William Roberts ARPA: liam@cs.qmw.ac.uk Queen Mary & Westfield College UUCP: liam@qmw-cs.UUCP Mile End Road AppleLink: UK0087 LONDON, E1 4NS, UK Tel: 071-975 5250 (Fax: 081-980 6533)
peirce@outpost.UUCP (Michael Peirce) (01/26/91)
In article <1991Jan24.233305.13194@magnus.ircc.ohio-state.edu>, talley@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (James T. Talley) writes: > > I have some questions about adding a cache card to a Mac IIci > running A/UX 2.0. The Mac IIci in question has 8 meg of RAM, 80 > meg internal and 40 meg external hard drives. It will primarily > be a network database/mail server. In other words, no one will > be using Macish applications on the console on a regular basis. > > The questions are: > > 1) Is it worth adding a cache card? Will it enhance the speed of > operation significantly for A/UX applications? I can notice the difference, but it's not all that much. It depends alot on what operations you are doing. It doesn't really help disk I/O much, but CPU bound tasks can run quite a bit fast. > 2) How hard is it to install? Do I just plug it in? Will I have > to run newconfig? Do I have to start hacking the kernel with a > hex binary editor? (Just kidding. :-) I just plugged it in and went. I'm not (currently) running A/UX, but I doubt there is any hassle involved. > 3) Does anyone have any recommendations on a particular brand? > Shall I just buy Apple's? Apple's isn't shipping right now (but will be soon). They made a few mistakes when they designed it :-) and had to recall there card. I bought a MacCache at the MacWorld Expo. It works great and comes with a little cdev that lets you turn it the cache on or off. I picked up the 64K version. They also have a 32K version, but the cost is the same so I went for the slightly greater performance the 64K provides. The only warning I know of is that if you are using bus master NuBus cards, make sure the cache you buy supports it. Evidently some don't and you end up with a corrupted cache. The MacCache claims to be NuBus master compatible. -- michael -- Michael Peirce -- outpost!peirce@claris.com -- Peirce Software -- Suite 301, 719 Hibiscus Place -- Macintosh Programming -- San Jose, California 95117 -- & Consulting -- (408) 244-6554, AppleLink: PEIRCE