Re: What About Price vs. Performance

I don't want to minimize the AS/400s TCO advantage.  In fact, I devoted 6
years of my career to Windows development, and I'd have to say I worked 20%
harder and produced 80% less product.  My counterparts in Installations and
Support experienced the same thing.  Only the salesmen were happy.

For the past year I've been working on an AS/400 product.  And I care about
performance.  In many cases, I'll duplicate a function or subprocedure on my
$1600, 300mhz Laptop, to help me find bottlenecks and tweak performance in
my RPG version.  Encryption algorithms, string handling routines, stream
file functions, database I/O.  Frankly, in many cases, my PC often out
performs my AS/400 by a factor of 3 - 5 times.  I finally concluded that my
AS/400's CPW rating of 73 must have a close correlation to it's clock speed.

The problem is that Web applications do a lot of work with streams.  Both in
parsing the input received, and generating a dynamic response.  Not to
mention the number of interfaces between the socket server that receives the
request, and the application that delivers the response.  That kind of work
is highly CPU intensive.  We need fast CPUs.

Nathan.


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