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A comment on 2,500 continuous runtime hours on a 4.77Mhz DOS web server. Parent comment

Re:2,500 continuous runtime hours on a 4.77Mhz DOS web server by lucb1e on Friday July 14, 2023 @09:39PM (#36732299)
What kind of speed does that Xircom get?

I don't know what's on the site, maybe it's busy uploading data to various people, but usually the original 10mbps ethernet is enough to serve most ~light websites (anything that is not as heavy as youtube or an image blog basically) to the hacker news homepage, and I'm not getting synacks so this is not the web server (layer 7) being slow

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Re:2,500 continuous runtime hours on a 4.77Mhz DOS web server by anyfoo on Friday July 14, 2023 @09:43PM (#36732336)
I'm repeating myself a bit, but, dude, it's an 8088 (EDIT: ok, technically a NEC V20, pretty negligible though). It has an 8 bit wide bus. It runs at 4.77MHz and needs many cycles (at least 4? more?) per instruction. With a parallel port adapter, not even an 8 bit ISA one. I haven't done the math, not even on an envelope, but I somehow doubt the Ethernet adapter is the bottleneck here...
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Re:2,500 continuous runtime hours on a 4.77Mhz DOS web server by mbbrutman on Friday July 14, 2023 @09:47PM (#36732363)
The Xircom is pretty bad, as it costs a lot to do the I/O through the parallel port. Just using TCP/IP sockets (no disk access or processing) the machine can send and received about 42KB/sec. A better adapter can do nearly 3x that on the same machine.

Performance measurements here: https://www.brutman.com/mTCP/mTCP_Performance.html

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Re:2,500 continuous runtime hours on a 4.77Mhz DOS web server by anyfoo on Friday July 14, 2023 @09:52PM (#36732387)
So about 1Mbps max with a good adapter? Wow, more than I thought... yeah, a hard disk of the era, not even AT bus, most likely won't be able to keep up with that, heh.
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