Re: Looking for Oracle server

szhu_at_prism.poly.edu (Shu Bin Zhu) writes:

>We need to decide on a server to run oracle. The choice seems to narrow
>down to R/S6000 570 and the NCR 3450. I don't have the SPEC mark for
>the NCR 3450. Does anyone know which is a better machine. The NCR 3450
>has two 486-50 cpus.

The UNIX on the RS6000 series is stuffed primarily because it has a nonstandard  malloc(). Instead of getting the memory and giving you a pointer it gives you a pointer and then when you start using the memory, it then allocates it. Of course, the memory may not be there (you may have asked for 200 Zigabytes), and then it send a non-standard signal to your process.

Thus, many standard UNIX programs need to be reworked in the signal handling parts and this is among the trickiest areas of applications programming to work in. Try other UNIX related newsgroups to get other's opinions, but the general consensus is that while the RS series perform well, the core of the OS is brain damaged, primarily because of the malloc.

[ I guess you do not want all your programmers wondering why their programs "blue" up :-) ]

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