AppleShare File Server: Increasing Speed Bottlenecks



I am having performance difficulties using a Macintosh Plus as a network
server.

The network is correctly set up, and the load is fairly low (that is, there are
only about five users on it).

One possibility is that the problem is caused by using a CPU that is not fast
enough for the high performance of the 140MB Rodime external drive. Macintosh
IIx systems are often recommended as servers, even for small networks.

I would have thought that the bottlenecks would be the disk performance (all
that jumping around to meet different requests) and network performance
(particularly on LocalTalk), not CPU performance, and that small networks users
would get better value for their money if they used the Macintosh IIx as
workstation.

I understand that the drive has to be formatted on its target machine, and I
understand that the transfer rate for drives is faster on Macintosh II machines
than Macintosh SE systems (but still the network is a bottleneck).

Could you give me some advice on this?

Access time, CPU speed, and network throughput all affect the "speed" of a
network. It's difficult to determine just which one of the three elements
mentioned will result in the largest performance increase.

However, if you are restricted to LocalTalk, and already have the Rodime drive,
the only way to improve the network performance is to use a faster CPU.


Published Date: Feb 18, 2012