From: "Frank Haber" 

MikeM, do you do media work, or rich databases, or both?  I've seen you
make some extremely knowledgable replies to questions about media arcana,
as well as to ones about hi-perf networking.

Which brings me to some idle questions I have as a generalist.

Gigabit Ether Throughput:

o In 1993, with the best (?EISA) NICS and the fastest 486 then available,
you could load up 10Base to 20% and get 70-80% of theoretical max
throughput. I don't remember the loaded figures, but with heavy loads you
could at least expect 20-40% of theoretical, and response times (unless you
were unlucky) were still in the hard disk ballpark.  CPU usage was a
problem.

o In 1999, with 100Base, still running 1500 packets, with PCI dual NICs on
the server, the figures were more like 60% best-case, lightly loaded, and
the same old 33%, loaded.  CPU usage and streaming were both problems.

o In 2005, would you care to make a comparison, with Gigabit, and big,
RAM-heavy servers?  How is life different when you slap on a. a heavy load
of "classical," small-data SQL-ish requests, vs. when the data
follows the current imagebase fad, where every damnfool handwritten scrawl
gets stored at high res and indexed umpty-leben ways, including the
squashed insects, the form grid, and the coffee stains?

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5