I was doing some more Kermit-20 measurements while I continue to debug
the NRT code.
Again, the fastest transfer rate that I could get out of a loopback
pseudo-terminal connection was 129.16 KBps with a packet size of 140
characters (note previous post was in baud) .? Since this is not going
outside of the PDP-10, one assumes that it would either be the top speed
possible or near it as we are just talking shuttling data between buffers.
I did a transfer of the same file to an iMac and was /very/ surprised to
find that I got 4,000 byte packet size and a transfer rate 151.78 KBps.?
That's right, using the NI resulted in a speed _increase_ of 17%.? I
instrumented Kermit to report the allocated monitor buffers by line type
and got the table below from various sign ons, viz:
? TTY line Type:?? FE?? PTY? NRT? TVT? CTM
? Input Buffers:??? 1??? 1??? 1??? 1??? 1
? Output Buffers:?? 2??? 1??? 2??? 4??? 2
The abbreviations are as follows:
* ?FE, Front End (RSX-20F) terminal (there is only one, CTY)
* PTY, Pseudo-terminal
* NRT, DECnet Network Remote Terminal
* TVT, Internet Telnet Virtual Terminal
* CTM, DECnet CTERM (I forget what CTERM abbreviates to)
* LAT, Local Area Terminal (I don't currently have a working transport
and client for this)
So what we can see is that a TVT has four _times_ the buffers to play
with than the PTY.? I don't currently know how large a terminal buffer
is nor what else this might mean, but it is suggestive.
For what it's worth, I also did comparison with FTP.? A data transfer in
the RFC959 paradigm is acknowledged on the control channel with return
code of 226.? There are no acknowledgements of the data channel; it's a
straight fire hose.? As I expected, an FTP transfer blew Kermit right
out of the water.? For the same sized file, the 20 measured an upload
data rate of 1.09 *M*Bps with a 10 microsecond resolution (from first
network write to return from closing the transfer 'socket').? The iMac
measured 1.25 *M*Bps download.
So it would appear that an FTP transfer is about 7.38 times faster,
which is of interest, but otherwise perhaps irrelevant as they are not
even remotely doing the same thing.? One expects the same result for
DAP, once I get FTP up on that transport.? Again, we're not comparing
apples to apples.