Re: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch

Lukas,

Most of your complaints deal with the price / performance of the System i, and 
I must admit that if IBM were to lower the price or increase the performance, 
that would be fine with me, and I don't want to speak for IBM, but one point 
that a System i executive made recently is that bandwidth is often more of a 
bottleneck than CPU, which happens to me true in the case of my 520.

For example, I'm running a browser based Web application where the screen is 
divided into two inline frames.  A complete database record is displayed in the 
upper frame, while the bottom frame contains a list of records in a table.  
Pressing the [down arrow] key causes the highlight bar to move to the next row 
in the list, while at the same time firing off a request to the Apache based 
server to fetch the record from the database and return a response that updates 
the upper frame.

Holding down the arrow key causes the highlight bar to traverse the list at a 
rate of about 25 rows per second, while firing off requests to the server at 
the same rate.  Complete records are flying past in the upper frame at a rate 
that humanly impossible to read.

Under the Windows Task Manager, I can see Firefox consuming 98% of the CPU on 
my 2.4 GHZ processor, but when I flip over to the WRKACTJOB screen, I see the 
System i CPU running at 2%.  When I add up the total CPU time consumed by the 
Apache based server and my application server, I see that the System i is 
completing requests at a rate of 2 milliseconds per request, which frankly is 
faster than my PC and network can support.

I made a point earlier that my applications are running under the native 
virtual machine, and are written using native languages and database access 
methods, which streamlines the interface, and improves performance.

Nathan.





 
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