G.Eustace@massey.ac.nz (Glen Eustace) (05/21/91)
At a recent seminar, a point was made that concerns me. We have a large number of PCs running PC-NFS, yes the Sun product, but this question applies to the others as well. We were discussing network loading amongst other things and an incident was raised which implied that WordPerfect and certain other PC products would fail as network load increased. Now this was a failure as in the program reported an error not just a slowing done to the point of no longer being usable. We still have a significant number of 8086 based machines XT clones mainly which would almost all be run at 8MHz. We have seen mysterious software failures, most of which haven't been reproducable. The suggestion made at the seminar was that as the volume of packets going past the PC increases, the PC is less and less able to process them ( the PC CPU is just toooo slow. ). This problem is apparently aggravated by broadcasts but we don't seem to see alot of those. My questions are really these; At what point, in terms of network load, is traffic higher than an 8086 based PC can handle? Does the ethernet card make any difference ? We have WD8003Es and EBs. Has anyone experienced this kind of failure ? What product ? The only solution suggested was to subnet and bridge the network to attempt to reduce traffic to an acceptable level. What is acceptable? Comments would be appreciated. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Glen Eustace, Systems Software Manager | EMail: G.Eustace@massey.ac.nz Computer Centre, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand Phone: +64 63 69099 x7440, Fax: +64 63 505 607, Timezone: GMT-12