[1680] in Release_7.7_team
FYI: handling large binaries in classes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Barker)
Wed Feb 24 11:20:29 1999
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 10:57:46 -0500
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
From: Mike Barker <mbarker@MIT.EDU>
This was my musing about possible approaches. Note that the classroom is
1-115.
Craig tells me that we now have two situations where instructors have an
entire class try to run a large binary and suffer noticeable delay during
the start-up.
He says the binaries are approximately 20 MB, there are 20 to 30 students in
the class, and the binaries are served through NFS.
400 MB through a 10 megabit/sec pipe...gives about 320 sec, or five minutes
as the absolute best case, more likely something around ten minutes?
Possibilities I can think of:
1. move the files to local storage (how do we avoid them having to redo
this often?)
2. faster pipes? if they are always in one classroom, could that classroom
move up to 100 mbs service? Put the servers and systems on a fast subnet.
3. I don't think AFS would be better than NFS, but...
4. Any chance of "tuning" the nfs service to make startup of these things
faster?
5. Would having more servers make a noticable difference? especially if
the servers are located "near" the users (in terms of topology, not
necessarily physically).
Any other help we can suggest? Frankly, I don't really think there is a
good solution aside from teaching the vendors to write better code.
Mike
