sizing question

Hello all.

I have a rather ambiguous question. It is more of a 'what has your experience been' question than anything else. I'm trying to gather some informal statistics on what kind of load a 'properly' configured database can handle on a given machine.

Some background:

The company that I own is a large way through developing a new app that will essentially replace the functionality of an Exchange server and add quite a few more toys and whistles (this is in no way a post to attract attention to that however). At the moment we would consider the design reasonable (appropriate use of bind variables, proper index and schema design, etc, etc). It's being developed in Delphi and Kylix and will sit on top of one or more Oracle instances, possibly replicated.

The question(s) that we would like to get a better handle on are:

Given an appropriately designed app how many concurrent connections could a db be reasonably expected to handle on, say, a 4 way Wintel box? How about a 8 Way Solaris machine? Would it be reasonable to expect a 4 way Wintel box to be able to handle 500 concurrent users sending/receiving email, adding contacts, scheduling meetings, that sort of thing. Would people suggest a farm of cheapie Linux boxen or one big honkin Solaris machine?

I realize these are extremely difficult questions to answer and so what I would really like is for anyone who is willing to maybe send a brief note saying something to the effect of 'this is our app, this is what it does, this is the box, this is the load it handles'.

Any and all replies would be appreciated :)

Regards,

Dave Haas Received on Fri Dec 27 2002 - 17:27:48 CST