Date: Fri, 19 Aug 88 18:24 CDT
From: sysop@killer.Dallas.TX.US (Charles Boykin-BBS Admin)
Subject: Re:  3B2-500s

   I recently changed killer from a 3B2/400 to a 3B2/500 with 8 MB memory, a
vcache, and a MPB. The 400 was four days behind unpacking/uncompressing the
news batches and was pretty slow. The 500 unpacked the news backlog within
two hours and was completely up to date in 2 1/2 while the CPU was running
at 60% idle during all this. The kernel still has not been tuned for any
change in performance from default and the machine will only go into swapping
when four uncompress processes, two compress processes, and more than five
users on the system - and the most I have seen it swap is ~400 blocks. With
the MPB, the system is rated at 4.0 MIPS with 16ms average disk access time -
I have 2.1 GIG disk space on the system. So, to answer your question, there
is really no comparison between the 310 and the 500 - the 500 is far faster.
The 3B2/400 uses the same system board as the 310 so the machines are virtually
identical except for the ports card cage and the physical capacity of two
hard disks internal. There is an additional enhancement now available for the
500 - a 22 MHZ CPU that will handle two MPB boards and can use the new 16MB
RAM cards - that are the same size as the 4MB cards. This allows 32MB RAM
with the 22MHZ CPU with comparable performance improvements.

                                                   Charlie Boykin
                                                   ..killer!root