Hello all.

We presently use an application with DBISAM C/S and generally 2 but
sometimes 3 users.

The application and data is on our server.  I say server, but to be frank it
is an HP dx5150 MT Athlon 64 3800 Dual Core 512MB 160GB XPP running XP Home.

I have changed the 160GB drive for a pair of 250GB SATA drives set up as
raid 0.

Users log in from fairly bog standard desktops.  The network is a Gigabit as
of course are the cards.

If I purchased a small business server such as those advertised by DELL with
say a Xeon chip and a 4 disk raid 5 (I think) would I get noticeably
enhanced performance?

The main table has a number of blob fields which I suspect slows things
down.  I also have about 40 open queries ay any time.  Several are linked to
the main table.

Does using Windows 2003 server make a big difference?

All comments welcome.

Thanks.

Rob.

Robert,

<< If I purchased a small business server such as those advertised by DELL
with say a Xeon chip and a 4 disk raid 5 (I think) would I get noticeably
enhanced performance? >>

Unfortunately this is something you need to test in order to determine.  It
really depends upon what the machine is doing that is consuming the time.
IOW, is the time being spent on threads waiting for CPU time or is it a
situation where threads are suspended because they are waiting on a shared
resource such as a lock ?  Improving the machine CPU configuration won't
help a situation that is a locking and concurrency issue.  However, in your
case with 2 or 3 users, you can probably safely count on concurrency not
being a huge issue.

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

"Robert Rowlands" <rob@notathome.com> skrev i en meddelelse
news:22F1038C-C10F-4F57-84E3-49A80EF916E2@news.elevatesoft.com...
> If I purchased a small business server such as those advertised by
> DELL with say a Xeon chip and a 4 disk raid 5 (I think) would I get
> noticeably enhanced performance?
>
> The main table has a number of blob fields which I suspect slows
> things down.  I also have about 40 open queries ay any time.  Several
> are linked to the main table.
>

I don't know if you can use my expirence to anything, but here goes...

We use DBISAM 3 C/S with on a central server and about 200-220 remote
clients(via the internet). Each client has one large table(20~1000MB)
without blobs, just hundres of thousands of records. We search for
hash-strings in these tables and we are doing so 2-3 times per second
per concurrent user(about 50 concurrent users in primetime). First we
used a server with normal SATA disks, but this started to slow down at
about 20 concurrent users, we then tried another server with SCSI disks,
10x 146GB/15kRPM in RAID 10 and it made a huge difference, we can't see
any performance difference between 10 concurrent users and 70 concurrent
users so we seemed to have a bottleneck in the harddrives/controller in
our first setup...

You mention Dell yourself, we are using their PowerEdge 1950 in the
setup i mentioned above. We changed the 10x146GB(external diskarray) to
6 internally 300GB SAS disks in a 2950 instead...still performs like a
million

My advice: Go for SCSI/SAS in RAID10 setup...for instance a 2950 with 6x
146GB, 10kRPM/15kRPM depending on your budgetRemember to call Dell
when you need the price, we can typically cut 20-30% off their internet
prices, just by calling! (and sometimes they can offer you different
configurations then the ones on their homepage)

Best Regards
 Thomas