Setting up a Sparcstation lab.

[Mitchell Wyle]

In article <2910 at brazos.Rice.edu> greg at duke.cs.unlv.edu (Greg Wohletz) writes:
>X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 192, message 2 of 14
>|We are considering setting up a small lab of SUN Sparcstations and were 
>|wondering if anyone else had had experiences (good or bad) with a similar
>|setup. Here is what we are considering:
>| 1.) ~10 Sparcstations, each with 8M of memory and a single 104M local disk
>|     for paging and temp space.
>| 2.) An additional Sparcstation with ~2G of SCSI disk space to act as a
>|     file server for 1.).

Unless you plan to stay at a 4.0.x release of SunOS, Sunview, and have
fewer than 3 windows open, you should *definitely* get more than 8 Mb per
ss-1.

You mentioned nothing about the applications you want to run.  Lots of
large compiles?  Oracle?  Get more memory.  Wait til January to get your
memory, though.  There is a production line in Japan about to open which
will double the world's current 1Mb simms output.

>We have 25 sparactations here, each has 8 meg and a load 104M disk.  Our
>experiance has been that 8M of memory is not sufficient.  With about 3
>windows open, and a C compile going the machine will page heavily.  We are 
>planning on uping most of ours to at least 12Meg.

It seems to me that 12 is a bad compromise.  Either you limp along with 8
or you go whole-hog for 16.  The German Sun Users' group electronic
mailing list had a discussion about xview News/X and memory; 12M wasn't
quite enough.  The consensus was that future SunOS releases are going to
want 16M in a compiling environment and at least 12 MIPS.

It sort of reminds me of the IBM Mega-line-of-code operating systems which
eat 1 MIPS to figure out what to do with one key stroke...