Re: Users on a single CPU (sparc)

"simong" <xx_sg1_at_niks.demon.co.uk> wrote in message news:95a57eec.0205101758.5d6494e2_at_posting.google.com...
> Have I got any chance of running 70 users on a Sun Ultra 10 (500MB
> RAM, 300 MHz processor, UltraSCSI disc)? The database has several
> tables bigger than 300 MB, and is maybe 2GB in total (transaction
> processing, not 'datamart' - as you guys can probably work out fom
the
> table sizes)
> Would it help if I banned users from running long reports - or won't
> this hardware even handle 70 users ?
>
> Thanks (hopefully)

How many disk drives do you have? You'll want to have plenty. <g> I'd also be very vigilante about the SQL: ensure that you've tuned it as best as possible because you want to squeeze every drop of performance out of this box. You mention 70 users, of those 70, what do you figure will be the percentage that are concurrent? You might be able to run some reports but I'd set an expectation of not allowing it at first, then see how many spare cycles you have. If you have any spare cycles, then allow it -- make sure to run a test first and see how much impact it has on your system. You probably already know this but you want to run vmstat/iostats with three second sample periods. If it's larger, you may lose some of the data due to averaging. Smaller you might not have enough cycles to drive the metric collection and in this situation, you might see the Heisenberg effect.

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Pablo Sanchez, High-Performance Database Engineering
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