[rescue] Small servers (was Re: WTT: 1.5G of PC2700 for 1G of PC100)

[Phil Stracchino]

Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> One of the best performance charts I have ever seen is in "Programming 
> Pearls".
> 
> They show a TRS-80 and a DEC Alpha doing the same job, but the TRS-80 
> code is better written.
> 
> The DEC is hundreds of times faster... until the problem size increases 
> to a point at which the DEC would take 400 years to do what the TRS-80 
> does in fifteen minutes.

My first reaction is that the code being run on the Alpha had to have 
been frighteningly, perhaps even implausibly, bad to produce that vast 
of a throughput difference between hardware so hugely different in speed 
and capability while the problem size was still in a range the TRS-80 
could handle at all.  (And I suspect the problem was very carefully chosen.)


-- 
   Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
   alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
          Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                  It's not the years, it's the mileage.