> I wonder, how many 9fans are *actually* using CPU servers? You and Ron both confirm my experience. The CPU server I have runs applications: e-mail, web, wiki, that type of thing. I can't use it to render Geotiffs as I have better resources (physical memory, CPU cycles, SWAP) in my workstation. I guess if I had homogenous hardware, I would allocate new resources where they are more beneficial (that's where the CPU server would consolidate the benefits of such resources), but the mish-mash of obsolete hardware I have accumulated just does not allow me to do so.
Something in that picture is worrying, because the file server is still a focal point and centralising processing power ought to be analogous, but empirically, they seem to be poles apart. It seems to me that the authors of the early Plan 9 papers would arrive to very different pictures if they were to consider our conditions vis-a-vis computing resources and telecommunication channels. In particular, the 100MHz Cyclone connection between CPU server and file server always suggests a reality check to me. ++L
