RE: Why is the iSeries so slow -- MIDRANGE-L

Scott wrote (in part):

See also the thread about why HPT is slow to an HP 4050 laser printer.
There's another place where it's not keeping up with reality.   Of course,
the answer is "use an AFP or IPDS printer."   and that suggestion is quite
correct, it will solve the problem, but should we have to do that?!  The
competition will print quickly to any type of printer.   Seems like
there's room for improvement here, too!

We have an assortment of HP printers, including several HP4050s-- Routine text-only print runs fine, with no speed problems. If we try to print documents with overlays and if the printers do not have an IPDS interface card, throughput across the network can be s-l-o-w- --- after all, the AS/400 is building, and we're shipping, a complete bit map of each and every page across the net! IPDS will cache the overlay at the printer, and just send the variable data. In the same building, overlays print with acceptable speed with or without IPDS.

Another example is hardware problems.  Over the past 10 years I've had 7
disk failures, 2 tape drive failures, 1 power supply failure, 1
shorted-out card cage on my iSeries.   Sure, the PC hardware has problems
too... but I've got a PC running FreeBSD that's had no hardware problems
over 8 years, which is a much better record.   If I do have a problem, I
can replace the whole system with a high-quality $400 dell server.

With the exception of the power supply and shorted card cage, what was your system down time?

We've had several disk failures over the past 5 years, and none has required us to bring down the system to fix. Of course, I wouldn't run a system like the AS/400 without RAID or Mirroring. [We used to run our System/38 without it, and got a bad batch of 3rd party drives that kept failing on us. The manufacturer provided us with enough extra drives to set up and use Checksum (remember that? RAID, but driven by the CPU), and enough extra memory that the overhead for Checksum wasn't felt. Since then, we've never run without either Checksum, Raid, or Mirroring]

Our 2 main systems each have over 200 four-gig drives. With that many disk arms, our performance is great (for a system of its size and speed). However, we accept a disk failure as likely, considering that they spin 24x7x365 for years on end. As they age, all disk drives become more likely to fall over dead.

A tape drive failure is annoying, but unless you have to poke at the interface card, shouldn't result in system down time. As far as reliability, how many miles of tape ran through the drives before the failures? Our tape drives have had several service calls over the years-- we still run 2 old 3490 drives on each of our 2 main machines, and all have had service calls. We also have an old 'pizza oven' reel-to-reel drive, which has been kept running (I don't know how!). Tape drives reliable? Yes. Perfect? No!

But, I'm going to regret posting this, because I just know people on this
list are going to boo at me, and hiss at me, and tell me I'm wrong
(despite that these are my personal experiences).   This really is a bad
place to post things like this, since the bias on this list is very
strongly towards OS/400.

Just so you're not disappointed: BOOO!! HISSSS!!! (:

Wrong? No. You have experienced what you've experienced. But I contend that no PC-based system can run as much stuff simultaneously as the AS/400. We have dozens of PC-based servers in our computer room. Each box does a single job. Seems that PC-based machines get annoyed if you try to run too many different functions on one box! I look at them as if they were a big AS/400, with lots of subsystems. Only in the PC world, each subsystem requires a separate dedicated box. The AS/400 can stuff all of the functions into a single box, with the advantage that you can share the disk space and processor power where needed, and not have most of the PC servers waiting for something to do (!).

Biased towards OS/400? You bet! Is it a perfect machine? No. But as far as running hundreds of simultaneous users, accessing gigabytes of data, I'll match an AS/400 against any PC-based database machine. Can PC databases handle that many simultaneous users without choking? Or drive dozens of printers? The AS/400 was -designed- to handle the traffic. The fact that PCs can do a decent job is amazing!

Hope you don't get too much flak about this!

--Paul E Musselman
PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx