rtp1@tank.uchicago.edu (raymond thomas pierrehumbert) (04/09/90)
With the appearance of the IIfx, there has been a lot of blather to the
effect that "now the Mac is a real workstation." The question of
"is it a workstation" is about as meaningless as the question "Is it
a supercomputer?" As far as I am concerned, the Mac512 I originally
had years ago was already a workstation, as I got work done on it
of all sorts, and regularly used in in conjunction with other computers
(a ---gaack--- CYBER205).
However, there is one respect in which the "real" workstations seem
to consistently outperform the macs, and that is Ethernet performance.
I have floated questions of this sort on the net before, but never
gotten any convincing answers. Basically, using NCSA Telnet (the
nonTCP version-- does anybody have timings for the TCP version?) no
matter how I twiddle, I don't get transfer speeds on FTP of more than
about 30K bytes per second. I get similar results for Appleshare
file copies from an NFS host via Gatorbox. I don't think it is
disk limited, since I get similar results with 40 and 80 meg drives,
and with the RAM cache turned on or off. Every other machine on the
net (even lowly Sun 3's) get performance in excess of 70k bytes/sec.
Last time I mentioned this, I got lots of hate mail to the effect that
"if you want real performance, get a real computer," (presumably a
Sun). No more of this please. I have plenty of real computers,
but have Macs on the net because they do things the others don't.
However, the awful Ethernet performance (I'm using the Apple card)
is a real problem. I'd like to know if anybody is getting better
performance than I am, and if so how it is done. I am particularly
interested in HARD TIMINGS for MacTCP. Also in performance on the
IIfx, a matter about which Apple has been curiously silent.
Please email responses to me, and I will summarize for the net.