greg@anacapa.NCEL.Navy.Mil (Gregory K. Ramsey) (10/31/90)
I would like to ask the net on their learned opinions regarding the performance penalty of a 386/486 UNIX vs. DOS. Our situation; we have a division doing AEC type work currently using two 386/33 and several 286 standalone machines running Autocad and some surveying, design and digital terrain modeling packages. We have 300Mbyte 28ms drives and VGA and expect to stay with this for all the new machines. Our idea is to upgrade everyone to 386 or 486 machines and network them with some variety of UNIX & X-windows with one or two servers and 10-15 clients. My main question is what performance degradation (if any) will my users see considering all the overhead that UNIX, X-windows, network communication and system management processes will bring along. Will the 286 (8 & 12 Mhz) users see an apparent performance increase, status quo or decrease. The users perception is what I am really interested in here, but if you have any (or know of any) numbers that would really be appreciated. What about the 386 users? Would the performance be any better if we went with a Novell type net. Any comments on my questions or on any related ideas would be very much appreciated. Post or Email to me and I will summarize to the net if there is interest. Vendors are invited to send me their sales material particularly if it address the questions, but I am particularly interested in the opinions of users. Greg greg@anacapa.ncel.navy.mil Greg Ramsey Naval Civil Engineering Lab Code L54 Port Hueneme, CA 93043 805/982-9720 FAX/982-1418