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Date:      Thu, 4 Jul 1996 12:04:30 +0300 (EET DST)
From:      "Andrew V. Stesin" <stesin@elvisti.kiev.ua>
To:        bde@zeta.org.au (Bruce Evans)
Cc:        hardware@freebsd.org, isp@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: muliport boards - building a PPP dialup server
Message-ID:  <199607040904.MAA23321@office.elvisti.kiev.ua>
In-Reply-To: <199607032027.GAA15101@godzilla.zeta.org.au> from "Bruce Evans" at Jul 4, 96 06:27:05 am

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[... Cc: trimmed ...]

Thanks alot for the explanation, Bruce!

# source						overhead	relative
# ------
# serial interrupt overheads			3% per 11KB	1
# system overheads for termios raw mode input	3.3		1
# system overheads for cslip input		3.7		1+
# system overheads for pppd input			6.1		2
# system overheads for termios cooked mode input	huge (50?)	16
# 
# The system overheads are easy to reduce by replacing the 486/33 with a
# Pentium.  The interrupt overheads are mostly I/O overheads so they are
# hard to reduce because boards with fast I/O are hard to find.

	So an idea to get a PCI board seems to be pretty reasonable...

# >	2. ISA bus itself, no matter what will I put into it.
# 
# This is the main bottleneck on anything faster than a DX2/66, at least
# if 8-bit I/O is used.  The overheads for Comtrol RocketPorts would be
# about half as small because RocketPorts support 16-bit I/O.

	Anyway, ISA is a dead-end, I think.  (Consider the following:
	16 ports seems to be an upper limit for ISA card at 8MHz, even if
	it's 16bit "smart" one -- simply because it's ISA.
	PCI has 33Mhz => 4 times faster,
	it's a 32bit bus => add two times more.  So PCI intellgent
	card should be able to handle at least 8 times more ports
	at full speed, => up to 128 ones!  And just today I have
	a headache -- we already have 16 ports busy on a dialup
	server, what will I do when some 2 more lines will come?
	Seems that getting a smart PCI serial device is the
	easiest solution and a more reasonable investment than
	a second server, considering added complexity of distributed
	system).

# Bruce
# 

-- 

	With best regards -- Andrew Stesin.

	Phones/fax:  +380 (44) { 244-0122, 276-0188, 271-3457, 271-3560 }

	"You may delegate authority, but not responsibility."
					Frank's Management Rule #1.



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