info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA (10/04/84)
From: Richard Garland <OC.GARLAND%CU20B@COLUMBIA> A couple of weeks ago Kevin Corasso (Sorry Kevin if I spelled that wrong) was talking about the DEC DUENA ethernet interface and gave the following figures: DECNET throughput - 280 kbaud TEK TCP/IP throuput - 140 kbaud I assume these are between 2 780's running VMS V3.x (x>4) for large file transfer with little else going on. Is that the way it was Kevin? What I would like to know is: 1) WHat these numbers depend on as for operating parameters (file size, machine loading, Unibus traffic, buffer size etc.) 2) How does the throughput compare with: TWG TCP/IP (on a similar VAX) 4.2BSD TCP/IP (on a Similar VAX) the "other" VMS TCP/IP (forgot the vendor.) The "other" TCP was mentioned some months ago on this list in a comparison with TWG TCP. I can't find these figures. Does this list still have an archive somewhere? What was mildly surprising (not really I guess) is that DECnet out- performed TCP by so much. Are these (Kevin's) figures anomolous? I know DEC banged on DECnet a lot to optimize it over Ethernet but is TCP really twice as slow. Is it a more burdensome protocol for some reason? Is this just TEK or are other TCP implementations the same (hence the above query)? It would be nice to fill in the blanks in the following chart: Network-vendor Throughput DECnet (DEC) 280 kb TCP/IP (TEK) 140 kb TCP/IP (TWG) ?? TCP/IP ("other?") ?? TCP/IP unix 4.2BSD ?? Thanks if anyone can help complete this information. Remote terminal support is of course a whole nother comparison which would be interesting and useful, although somewhat harder (I think) to characterize numerically. Any ideas how to characterize terminal use over a network? Anyone with any numbers. (DEC says their new DECnet terminal protocol (V4.0) is "much faster than before" - this is not LAT which is another terminal protocol which runs on ethernet: "LAT is much faster than DECnet". How much is "much faster than much faster than ..."? Oh well. we'll see.) Rg -------