The one above is the flabby old body, an IBM C10 RS/6000. Actually, it's a nice compact little server machine, but it had become severely overloaded due the the growing using of email and other Internet services by the college. A server that's appropriate sized should be running at about 30-40% of capacity....because usage loads are never smooth and even...they peak a lot and you need the reserve capacity to handle surging peak loads in quickly. This old machine wasn't up to the growing load; it would run maxed out at 100% for as much as 15 to 20 minutes when peak loads hit. This meant that response times were long, that sometimes connections would be dropped. When you wait in line in a heavily loaded computer, sometimes it takes so long for you to get your turn at computer services that the program that you're using or communicating with gives up waiting and "drops" you. We used to have a lot of time-outs during peak loads.
The machine on the right is the new taut young
body, an IBM F50 RS/6000. It runs about 8 times faster than
the old machine; it currently runs at about 10 - 30 % busy.
It can be considerably enhanced to grow as Bard's user
load grows. More processors can be added: this will boost machine
speed as high as 32 times faster than the old machine. More memory
and disk can also be added.
Both these machines run UNIX, which is the operating system of the Internet.
