This might actually be relevant to NANOG. Wow. Amazing.
physical memory = 512.00 megabytes. available memory = 497.74 megabytes. using 1958 buffers containing 15.29 _megabytes of memory AlphaStation 255/300 system DECchip 21071
Hey, that's great.
So are you seeing performance problems from all the bloat that they are allowing to creep into the tables?
None. Difficult though this is to say after working for DEC during the "dark times" of the MicroVAX II and DECstation 5000, and after being such a strong BSD/OS booster in the years since then: the Alpha is amazing, and Digital UNIX (used to be DEC OSF/1) is not nearly as horrible as Solaris or HP-UX (or SunOS or Ultrix for that matter). The above system runs like the wind. 512MB, 333MHz, 256bit memory bus, 4MB cache, wide SCSI. I wish I could get sources for Digital UNIX, but I can use NetBSD (or Linux, I guess) in applications where that's absolutely needed. For the most part I've been able to compile any 4.4BSD-ish (or POSIXish) application without any trouble, and Digital UNIX has a log structured file system that's hugely faster than stock BSD UFS/FFS. (My MH inbox has 2000 messages in it and I can "rescan" in mh-e in 12 seconds.) My internal net is about 50% Digital UNIX and 50% BSD/OS at this point. (Whenever someone else is buying, I ask for an Alpha with Digital UNIX.) If anyone on NANOG is evaluating architectures for high performance servers, this is the one to check out. (I have a hard time getting _anything_ to compile on Solaris or HP-UX.) Indeed, while I was at DEC (1988-1993), their hardware and software was just horrid. And now here I sit, typing this on a DEC HiNote II laptop running BSD/OS, using a DEC Roamabout wireless ethernet, running X emacs to a DEC Alpha that's my desktop workstation. After I left they started doing things right. (I used to cry in my beer about this, but now I just drink the beer.)