Re: Users on a single CPU (sparc)

simong wrote:

> Thanks to all those who've replied so far.
> I can hang a couple of SCSI discs on this U10 if I need to, or push
> the RAM up - but I'm intrigued by suggestions that RAM/discs might be
> a problem; with this box I thought it would be more likely to be the
> shortage of processor cycles !
> Would it really help to push it up to maybe 1GB RAM ?
> My 70 concurrent sessions are exactly that. They won't all be
> particularly active at once, but if they do all start updating and
> querying at the same time will this box just die ? I can probably get
> away with restricting the big reports, but I don't want to even start
> out on this if I'm likely to saturate the system at 30-40 users even
> if the Oracle side is reasonably well tuned.
>
> A very long time ago I was involved with an Oracle6/Forms 2.3
> application that quite happily supported 15 users running on a 386
> (with 24 Mb RAM, if I remember correctly !) However, where I am now
> they initially installed the current application on the same U10 and
> it just crawled even with only 15 users - but it only had IDE discs
> and 128 MB RAM, and the Oracle side was badly configured. We've done
> some limited testing using 256 MB RAM and the one SCSI disc, and
> simulating maybe 20 sessions, and the peformance at that loading seems
> fairly reasonable (until the long reports kick in...!!)
>
> But 20 sessions was about as many as the 3 of us here could manage to
> put together- I figured it'd be easier to ask around about our chances
> of getting up to 70!!
>
> SimonG

Depending on what your transactions are like (size and resource requirements) you could be just fine. I would definitely hang as many disks on it as you can (within reason) and add more RAM. But often one finds hardware being thrown at a problem to cover up poor configuration. So if the system is turned and kept tuned (tuning is not a one time operation) you can probably survive depending on what you are trying to do.

On the other hand I'd advise you to take a good look at eBay. I saw a 4CPU HP 9000 K box go about a month ago for $975. Right now there is a Sun e3000 with dual 250MHz processors 1.25GB RAM, and 8 x 4.3GB 7200RPM Ultra SCSI Wide hot swap drives available for $3000 or less.

Daniel Morgan Received on Sat May 11 2002 - 08:41:54 CDT