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NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 17:15:56 -0600
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Subject: Re: The TransRelational Model: Performance Concerns
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 16:15:50 -0700
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pc <magoo@pssstoff.org> writes:
> i wonder would we be seeing a different world now had the old core
> memory been as cheap and plentiful as today's.

there is actually a number of different issues ... the amount of core
memory as well as the relatively performance.

i took some heat starting in the late '70s for claiming that the
relative system performance had declined by a factor of ten over a
10-15 year period (disk performance had increased by 3-5 times but cpu
& memory had increased by 50 times .,.. so the relative system disk
performance declined by a factor of 10).

the disk division got annoyed and assigned their performance
organization to refute the statements. they took a couple months and
came back saying that i had slightly under stated the problem.  this
eventually turned into a user group presentation on recommendations
about how to structure & use disks for better system
performance. random recent posting somewhat related to the topic
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#76

I've frequently claimed that the CKD architecture from the 60s was a
trade-off of i/o capacity vis-a-vis limited real memory ... aka it was
possible to put the index structure on disk and have the i/o subsystem
execute a program to find specific kinds of data and read only what
was necessary into storage. this avoided having to use any of real
storage for caching of either data and/or index pointers. by the
mid-70s the resource constraint was starting to shift from real memory
to i/o ... and CKD became the wrong trade-off in that environment.
random past postings related to the CKD trade-off and the criteria
that assumptions were based on totally reversing over a period of time
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#dasd
and slightly related posts on bdam &/or cics
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#bdam

in the early 90s ... one of the large airline res systems were
complaining that they had applications with (at least) ten impossible
things that they couldn't do in the existing infrastructure. I looked
at one of the applications (routes) that accounted for
approx. 25percent of total system load and rewrote it from scratch.

Much of the fundamental architecture and assumptions hadn't changed
since the 60s .... so I reset to zero and re-examined the fundamental
architecture assumptions that had been made and tried to determine if
they still applied (and if not, what could i do if I was starting
totally from scratch). I got about a 100-fold speed up AND was able to
implement all ten impossible features (which when done resulted in
only a net 10-fold speed up .. since it was doing a lot more).

-- 
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
