Re: [MacPerl] Perl Shared Library (was Re: [MacPerl] ports and

[Richard Gordon <gordon@mindspring.com>]

On 1/25/99 at 17:39, brianmc@telebyte.net (Brian McNett) wrote:

> Another point often missed here, is that the MacOS has excellent 
> crash-recovery built in.  I know most people don't think of the MacOS as 
> reliable enough for heavy-duty server use,  Crashes may be more frequent 
> under MacOS than *nix, but when *nix crashes, it's more often from some 
> serious hardware problem (as noted by others).  Don't even bother me with 
> crashes under NT.
> 
> Properly configured, the Mac OS can reboot itself, load all the 
> previously running applications, and restore itself to the condition it 
> was in prior to the crash.  Not as nice as just killing and restarting 
> the offending app, I'll admit, but practically bullet-proof in it's own 
> right. Mycoinfo's webhost, Digital.Forest, past-masters of running Mac 
> servers, have done a sterling job providing a server which was down only 
> three days in the past year (while Digital.Forest was physically moving 
> their entire offices across town!). 
> 
In a server role, you are absolutely correct. I've kept AppleShare servers
up for 90-120 days at a time with flawless performance and only rebooted in
order to tidy up memory (or to shutdown for Xmas, part of my deal with the
machines). When Macs crash hard, it is usually fairly easy to figure out
what's screwed and fix it, while I'm not so sure about that with unix and
know for a fact it's not the case with any version of Windows you can bring
yourself to mention.

However, the MacOS is pretty lame about blowing up while multitasking and
turning out the lights even tho there's no real reason why that should
happen. For MacOS X to be revolutionary, the big deal is making the OS
bulletproof without inflicting unix stuff on users unless they want to go
that way. If Apple can pull that off and let you decide how much of the back
office you want to deal with, OS X will in fact be the greatest thing since
lap dances.

Richard Gordon
Gordon Consulting & Design
Voice: 770-565-8267  Fax: 770-971-6887



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