[ee122] last minute questions

[Daniel Killebrew]

"Programs will be tested on c199.eecs.berkeley.edu (a Solaris machine), 
so your final submitted
code should work on that machine."

Make sure your makefile compiles by default for c199.


We told you that if you wanted to test on a machine without a firewall, 
ilinux3 could be used for that purpose. We never intended to imply that 
your programs will be tested specifically on the ilinux machine. Of 
course, your code should be endianness-independent. Meaning if I run in 
on a little endian machine and a big endian machine it should work on both.


Nescio Nomen wrote:
> The specs report that we have to make a makefile.  As everyone's also 
> already noted though, the flags you pass into the compiler differ 
> depending on what operating system you are using.  Should we assume 
> we're going to compile on linux (no need for lsocket etc flags and in 
> fact might crash) or unix (must have flags or won't compile)?  I know 
> the specs say that "The programs must compile and run on the UNIX 
> instructional account machines" but I want to confirm since we were 
> told to also test on ilinux.
>
> Another, more important, question-- can we assume that there will be 
> some upperlimit to the number of clients and also an upper limit to 
> the data they send?  It seems that if we don't assume this that the 
> code will get kind of hairy (hairier?), i.e. involving lots of 
> malloc-ing and free-ing once we realize "oh wait, there's more coming, 
> oh wait more data than i thought."  I think some other people alluded 
> to this but I don't recall if a concrete answer was given.  Right now 
> I'm assuming that we will never get more than 5000 clients and that, 
> between the client and any given server, no more than 10,000 bytes are 
> sent/being sent at any time. If this is not the kind of assumption we 
> should be making, how many points could we lose for hardcoding this?  
> I guess it could count as a stylistic issue?
>
>
Don't hardcode anything in as to how many clients will connect and how 
many byes they will send you. It should be scalable up to the limits 
that the operating system imposes upon you. I wouldn't exactly call it a 
stylistic issue... Learning how to create scalable programs is 
important. I don't know the point breakdown. And it will make things 
more complex - "hairier" :)

Daniel