Re: Cheap hardware X-terms?

[Roger R Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

> I would personally wonder if old systems (ie, 486s that rarely come with
> more than 16MB of RAM) are up to the task of doing decent X service.
> Call up a single mainstream like Netscape or WordPerfect and you're
> swapping like crazy -- and I find the prospect of swapping over a
> network link to be downright chilling.

At work this summer, the Beowulf I built got better performance loading
from the ram of another machine over the 100 megabit ethernet than it
did loading from its own local drive.

Now granted these were PIII/550 Xeons, and their ram was going at 10ns
compared to the 60ns or 70ns that a 486 would use, but a good 100mbit
ethernet card is $45 these days (and a good enough one is $10).

There's a project at Berkeley (or maybe it's Stanford) to use "network ram"
-- computers on campus that aren't being used currently "export" their ram
over the network to other machines that need it. They're actually doing this
right now, and as far as they say, it works.

So don't knock ethernet. :) (But a good 100mbit switch is going to cost you
perhaps a couple thousand. So yes, there are a number of tradeoffs...)

I personally am in favor of making use of the cheap commodity trends of
modern PC's. While talking to Roman yesterday, I spec'ed out a nice K6-2/400
machine with 64 megs of ram, an 8M video card, and 100Mbit ether for perhaps
$300, minus monitor and drive. (And when ram prices go back down, it will be
under $250.) There's simply no reason to buy a machine to use it as an
xterm, with this amount of processing power available for comparable prices.
But it's true that there are a lot of old machines out there already, and
it's true that these sorts of prices aren't necessarily available outside
the US...

--Roger