Re: What About Price vs. Performance?

["James W. Kilgore" <eMail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joe Pluta wrote:
> 
<<snip>>
> "A well written web application can serve up a 3KB dynamically generated web
> page in about 100msec [of CPU time], as opposed to a green screen
> application outputting 1920 characters (or less) in about 20msec."
> 
> About a 3-1 KB/sec ratio (or less).

Hmmmm, must be the new math.  100 vs 20 looks like 5:1 ratio to this old
bird. ;-)

All kidding aside, one of the benefits of the 5250 controller (dates
back to the S/38) is that with a text based panel, AFAIK, the controller
only sends the changed characters not the entire screen.

So although you have the capability of having 1920 characters on a
screen, your data stream may be much smaller.  So let's say you put up a
panel with a clear instruction followed by 700 bytes of data and text. 
The user presses ENTER and you want to highlight a field.  It is my
understanding that the twinax controller will only send the necessary
code to cause the highlighting and _not_ resend the entire 700 bytes. 
I'm not sure if the TN5250 emulators receive the same benefit.

So I guess that the requirements for a 3k page to perform as well, one
would need a processor 5 times as fast and 3 times the data transmission
speed.

Now the data transmission speed is no problem.  Even the enhanced 5250
twinax, I think, runs at 2mb, so even a simple 10mb Ethernet can beat
that.  Even with collision recovery.

IBM's strides in processor enhancements take of of the processor
requirements.

The moral of the story is, you get a faster machine, a faster network,
then you change the interactive paradigm to try get the performance you
had to begin with.

Looking good doesn't come cheap or easy!

Ducking and running ;-)
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