Re: Performance over a WAN

"Elliott" <elliottj_at_earthlink.net> wrote:

>I have two clients who are running the same application (one that I
>developed) over their corporate WANs. This application is a window 32 bit
>app running against an Oracle database. One of them is getting good
>performance running over a T1 line, the other is getting terrible
>performance also over a T1 line. They are both running Unix servers. I can
>run the application over a standard telephone connection at 21,600 and get
>better performance than client number 2 above. I am running against an NT
>server. The client experiencing the poor performance blames the application.
>I am not that familiar with WANs and how they send and receive packets and
>if there is anything that can be done to improve performance. I do not
>really know where to start looking. If anyone can be of help with giving me
>some direction I would greatly appreciate it.
>
>

I am involved with a customer that has about 3,500 users (so far a max of just over 200 concurrent), a large proportion of which operate over a WAN.

We have found that performance is not so much a factor of bandwidth, but network latency. To test this, maybe start using tools like 'ping' and 'tnsping' to compare the two users. The services of a networking 'guru' will also help to pin-point the problem. Maybe there is slow or faulty switch/router affecting one of the users.

You don't mention what version of Oracle (and ODBC, I guess) you are using.

At the moment we are running a version of a 3rd party app that uses Oracle 7.3.4 (and its associated ODBC rev). We have done some preliminary testing of a later version of the app with Oracle 8.0.5 (and its ODBC) and have found that this combination gives us fewer but larger packets. There are roughly about 1/3 the number of packets. This combination seems to result in a 50% speed improvement when operating over a WAN (of course, this will also benefit a LAN but LAN performance is not a problem and the difference to a LAN user is imperceptible).

HTH, Mike. Received on Wed Dec 15 1999 - 03:57:16 CST