From: Barry Shein <bzs(_at_)world(_dot_)std(_dot_)com>
...
But to imply that because CPUs have gone from 1MHZ to 3GHZ that we can
now process 3000x as much mail is unsupportable and misleading.
It's also in a sense true. The volumes of mail are processed today
for reasonable costs are 3000X higher than the volumes of the era when
CPUs ran at single digit MHz. Tolerable mail volumes have gone up by
100X since the more recent days when CPUs ran at 10s of MHz. 10,000,000
mail messages/day is a lot today but no more remarkable than 100,000 mail
messages/day were 10 years ago.
Of course, the change is related much less to CPU clock speeds than
file system speeds. Disk drives have not become more than 50 or 100
times faster in that last 40 years (e.g. "big" and "fast" Data Products
drives of the early 1960's served ~50 MByte at 100-300 milliseconds
seek times), but file systems are running 1000 or 10,000 times faster
than they were 15 years ago. In the late 1980's, 1 MByte/sec through
read() or write() was respectable. Today you get yawns for 10
GBytes/sec. The changes are not in seek (head motion) or search
(rotational delay) times, but in transfer times and in the number of
spindles. Years ago very fancy "drums" had a few dozen heads. Today
a fast storage system will have more than that many drives acting like
one super fast drive thanks to in part to 1000 times more bits in RAM
cache than ancient drives had in spinning iron oxide.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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