How do they do it? (Sun systems)

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NulloModo

Supreme [H]ardness
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Dec 16, 2002
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Heya.

I went to the University of Delaware and the school has a series of computer labs, most of which are x-terminals running off of some central servers, Copeland, Strauss, and Mahler, that do all of the processing/compiling for CISC students as well as run the entire schools (20,000+ students) e-mail system.

Anyway, Copeland was the system that ran the main student body's e-mail system and the labs, and from what I understand it was already around 5 years old or more when I started school there in fall of '99. My question is, how does it do it? How does one system run 100+ xterms and manage the entire e-mail system without slowing down?

EDIT to clarify:

I don't know details of these systems other than they were all made by Sun.
 
Nothing magical about SUN.
Email takes no processing time. In many cases mail server is the role ancient hardware goes to die, there are many 4.77-5mhz 8086/68k/or similar CPUs running mail severs for buisnesses and organizations with hundreds or thousands of email accounts. You need a bit of storage space, but that's it.

X-Windows terminals are a bit more memory intensive, but few students do anything demanding of the CPU.

The student machine for the higher level comptuer science / computer engineering programing classes at my school was a PPro 200 with 128mb of ram as of last year. It handled 300 or so student accounts in a given semester doing web servers, java, perl, network and multithreaded programming in C, and it rarely broke a sweat.
Well, you get into class the day a project is due and 20 people open x-terms and ddd it took a hit, but for the most part that was plenty to share.
 
A terminal server with multiple CPU's, lots of RAM and a efficient time-sharing OS do it. Basic tasks most people do are very light resource wise, using <1% CPU time, and a few dozen MB of RAM, so you can hang a bunch of terminals off of one machine and a whole bunch of people all doing light tasks still dont tax the system.

You can do the same thing yourself with any "regular" PC. You could hang dumb terminals off of it, and have dozens of people all sharing the resources and you'd be surprised at how fluid it really is if you have enough resources on the server to start with.

And email is not intensive at all. Email servers simply wait for incoming connections to receive mail, grab it, write it to a file in the users directory and just wait for you to read it. Doing a quick check on my email server at home, looks like it's used a few minutes of CPU time for sendmail, and theres dozens of active users and over 10,000 emails in/out over the last 7+ months. So thats about 292,000 minutes uptime, and less than 5 minutes total were used in processing all that email :)
 
tdg said:
A terminal server with multiple CPU's, lots of RAM and a efficient time-sharing OS do it. Basic tasks most people do are very light resource wise, using <1% CPU time, and a few dozen MB of RAM, so you can hang a bunch of terminals off of one machine and a whole bunch of people all doing light tasks still dont tax the system.

You can do the same thing yourself with any "regular" PC. You could hang dumb terminals off of it, and have dozens of people all sharing the resources and you'd be surprised at how fluid it really is if you have enough resources on the server to start with.

And email is not intensive at all. Email servers simply wait for incoming connections to receive mail, grab it, write it to a file in the users directory and just wait for you to read it. Doing a quick check on my email server at home, looks like it's used a few minutes of CPU time for sendmail, and theres dozens of active users and over 10,000 emails in/out over the last 7+ months. So thats about 292,000 minutes uptime, and less than 5 minutes total were used in processing all that email :)
Click to expand...

I mean, it still makes sense, but the Tech Nazis always complain about sending big files over e-mail but yet it seems like the e-mail system is running on only a few percent of an antiquated system, so, what is the big deal?
 
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