Re: Oracle, NT, and 150 Users?

i'd be real tempted to go with at least a quad capable box like the new Dell Xeon - based 400Mhz box, with lots of disks for striping the data, possibly a full gig or more of memory, and caching disk controllers. I got decent select/update performance out of a quad p pro 200 box with a gig and 8 drives on 2 32MB caching controllers from micron/netframe. But that was not with 150 users... the real question is how efficient your queries are. my suggestions are based on running some complex reports with a few full table scans and use of parallel query option. if all your queries are using indexes, doing few sorts or joins, and not concurrent with data loads you might get by OK with 2 cpus and 512mb. but i'd at least make sure i could expand to 4 cpus and more memory.

i was going to buy an ALR with 4 CPUs and a gig for testing batch processing jobs on a 3 GB database - largest single table is 1gb and growing. current process takes 15 hours on a quad 466Mhz DEC Alpha / OpenVMS. the quad pro 200 was very close in performance to that, but the Dell Xeon is the same price and is supposed to be twice as fast.

i'd also go with the largest cache on CPU available when you buy - currently 1MB on the PPro and Xeon (the Xeon will go to 2MB eventually). it will make a difference with that many users. the dell i'm looking at now is about $41k with 4 1MB cpus, 10 9GB fast drives, 1GB RAM (8 dimms instead of 4 -
limits expandability but is supposed to be faster because of the interleave), and 4 SCSI buses. they are coming out with a faster SCSI card in a month or so, too.

we just had a few salesmen from compuware in pitching your QA products. they look real interesting. if we buy them i'll be able to send you some load benchmarks...

sam cappello
envision utility software
samc_at_fl.envworld.com

James L. Gehring wrote in message
<01bda9c6$1842ed60$cccf0180_at_amclvw26464.clv.am.bp.com>... I am sizing a box to run 150 users. These users will be processing transactions that will require them to query (and only query) the data at 2 to ten minute intervals throughout the day. The data that they are querying gets batch loaded into the system at night (Yep, downloaded from a mainframe!) so there is almost no insert/update processing on this "Data Mart" server from the user perspective.

Total data size is under 1 Gig (indexes and all). If I buy a dual processor Pentium with 1/2 a Gig of RAM and some good SCSI controllers, should this be sufficient if 100 of these users were to fire off a query at approximatley the same time? I would really be interested in hearing from someone who has a system like this or has experienced its performance first-hand.

We are planning on using Windows NT Server 4.0 and Oracle 8.0.3.

Please send your response via e-mail to:

GehrinJL_at_bp.com

Thanks in advance!

James L. Gehring
Compuware, Inc. Received on Fri Jul 10 1998 - 06:04:45 CEST