Re: Oldest Hack Sept. 1970 Just for Fun

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Thu, 05 Feb 2004 03:58:30 +0100, Erik van Straten <emvs.fd.3FB4D11C () cpo tn tudelft nl>  said:
> than unpatched XP). If I recall correctly only rwhod was commented
> out because it was a "performance pig" or something.

The "performance pig" issue was particularly bad on nets with lots of
dickless 3/50's.  One machine would plop a rwho packet out, and every
other box would scribble the packet into /var/spool/rwhod/<source-machine>.

Of course, if you had 25 dickless machines, that meant 25 boxes writing
into 25 files over NFS all at the same time.  Meanwhile, a Sun 3/50
had like 4M of memory, so it's paging over the network as well - so
you're paging in rwhod over the net, processing the packet, and then
doing NFS.  And everybody is doing that for each packet.

And there were nets that had 300+ Suns on the same wire. Oink, oink. :)

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