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0 pointswvenable2y ago0 comments

It actually works for me if you just wait long enough for it load. Which, at this point, is very impressive.

0 comments

Yep, at this point it's just continually busy.

For the next iteration I've got to put a better Ethernet card on it. The Xircom PE3-10BT device is nice because it's convenient, but the bandwidth would be 2x higher with a real Ethernet card on the bus.

And normally this machine is idle so the speed and bandwidth are not a problem. Right now it's very popular. :)

lucb1e2y ago

What kind of speed does that Xircom get?

I don't know what's on the site, maybe it's busy uploading data to various people, but usually the original 10mbps ethernet is enough to serve most ~light websites (anything that is not as heavy as youtube or an image blog basically) to the hacker news homepage, and I'm not getting synacks so this is not the web server (layer 7) being slow

mbbrutman2y ago

The Xircom is pretty bad, as it costs a lot to do the I/O through the parallel port. Just using TCP/IP sockets (no disk access or processing) the machine can send and received about 42KB/sec. A better adapter can do nearly 3x that on the same machine.

Performance measurements here: https://www.brutman.com/mTCP/mTCP_Performance.html

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anyfoo2y ago

I'm repeating myself a bit, but, dude, it's an 8088 (EDIT: ok, technically a NEC V20, pretty negligible though). It has an 8 bit wide bus. It runs at 4.77MHz and needs many cycles (at least 4? more?) per instruction. With a parallel port adapter, not even an 8 bit ISA one. I haven't done the math, not even on an envelope, but I somehow doubt the Ethernet adapter is the bottleneck here...

lucb1e2y ago

I'm not getting a SYNACK back from it within the default firefox-on-linux timeout of 60 seconds. Guess I'm obliged now to run Wireshark for the next hour to prove a point just in case it does respond to that (interplanetary latency style), but I'm going to call that at least fairly dead

Edit: actually, I'm not sure how long my router will keep a half-open tcp connection in its state table. It may not show up in Wireshark on my laptop. 10 minutes in, no synack showing up: I'm calling it

anyfoo2y ago

"Dead" for me is if it actually crashed and does not recover without interference. I'm not surprised that an 8088 (not even an 8086!) will either take a really long time to reply SYNACK, or just drop packets entirely when the queue is full, when hammered with HN levels of crowds.

It may be dead, but it also may just be busy.

mbbrutman2y ago

A few things to consider here:

  * It's getting hammered.  I didn't expect it to be this bad.
  * If it can't process things fast enough packets might be dropped.  So the TCP/IP error rates are probably pretty high right now.
  * It's logging all of this crap too ...

Normally it can do the handshake in tens of milliseconds. Right now the load on it is basically "crush." But it's queuing and answering as best as it can.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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mbbrutman2y ago

Yep, at this point it's just continually busy.

And normally this machine is idle so the speed and bandwidth are not a problem. Right now it's very popular. :)

lucb1e2y ago

What kind of speed does that Xircom get?

mbbrutman2y ago

Performance measurements here: https://www.brutman.com/mTCP/mTCP_Performance.html

1 more reply

anyfoo2y ago

lucb1e2y ago

anyfoo2y ago

It may be dead, but it also may just be busy.

mbbrutman2y ago

A few things to consider here:

  * It's getting hammered.  I didn't expect it to be this bad.
  * If it can't process things fast enough packets might be dropped.  So the TCP/IP error rates are probably pretty high right now.
  * It's logging all of this crap too ...

Normally it can do the handshake in tens of milliseconds. Right now the load on it is basically "crush." But it's queuing and answering as best as it can.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse