On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 09:28:06PM -0500, Douglas A. Tutty wrote: > On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 08:09:39PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote: > > On 01/23/08 19:44, Douglas A. Tutty wrote: > > > On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 07:17:50PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote: > > >> Have you yet bitched and complained how kids today have it so much > > >> easier, and don't appreciate what they have? > > > > > > tomorrow. Next week I expect a VT-520. I wonder how many VT-520s a > > > modern computer could support? > > > > Directly attached via a serial multi-port card, or via an Ethernet > > terminal server? > > May as well let the fancy new computer do the interrupt stuff. Direct > attach.
Some years back, at my last place of permanent full-time employment before going independent, I managed a herd of Wyse terminals in a manufaturing plant. They were all attached to a quad 800MHz Xeon server with 2G RAM and something like 50G disk (usable - it was more like 150G physical disk, but it was all RAIDed). I'd estimate it was somewhere on the order of 75 Wyse terms, plus another 75-100 ssh sessions from the desktop systems in the office and a couple dozen Neoware X terminals that we were using instead of the Wyses on new installs/replacements. It handled all that along with running the company's ERP database and an average of 5 print jobs/second (albeit mostly small ones - the vast majority were barcode labels) and never missed a beat. I can't speak to the "let the fancy new computer do the interrupt stuff" part, though, as every connection came in over ethernet, going to either terminal servers or print servers as needed, partly for simplicity, but mostly because a lot of the equipment was a couple hundred meters away from the server room. But I never really thought of that server as being terribly special in what it was handling. I was far more impressed by the single-CPU Athlon server (of about the same age, although I don't recall its cpu speed) with 1G RAM that served up X sessions to all those Neowares and several of the office computers. It generally had 40-50 sessions active, but still kept a nice, low load average and CPU utilization almost all the time and I never heard any complaints about responsiveness from anyone other than the one manager who couldn't bear the idea of using anything that wasn't Windows. Back to the original question, though, "I wonder how many VT-520s a modern computer could support?", I'd expect that to be well into 4 digits and 5 wouldn't surprise me at all. Ain't Moore's Law grand? -- I reckon we are now the only monastry ever that had a dungeon stuffed with sixteen thousand zombies. - perlmonks.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
