I have always pretty much just "bought a decent server" for my customers, leaving the hardware choices to others. However I know that EDB has some unusual features (strong use of GPU in DB calculations for example, I think). which might mean that particular specs would give far better user performance.

I am usually working with SME businesses who don't want to spend $$$$ ... but it would still be good to know what is worth spending money on.

I have gone over to use of Sold State Drives rather than Hard Disks recently, and this has definitely seen an up-lift. Obviously I also use 64bit (with EDBServer 64bit version running on the server). I add "as much RAM as possible" and the biggest processor the customer wants to pay for and that is about it.

Is it worth spending extra and over-specifing on:
* GPU
* Network adapters (given that lots of users will be hitting the server)

And if so, what should I specify?

On 11/7/2014 4:59 AM, Adam Brett wrote:
> However I know that EDB has some unusual features (strong use of GPU in DB calculations for example, I think). which might mean that particular specs would give far better user performance.

Where did you read this? I'm not aware of EDB using GPU for anything.

> I have gone over to use of Sold State Drives rather than Hard Disks recently, and this has definitely seen an up-lift. Obviously I also use 64bit (with EDBServer 64bit version running on the server). I add "as much RAM as possible" and the biggest processor the customer wants to pay for and that is about it.

It really will depend on your needs and load on the server as well as
where the bottlenecks are.

Solid disk drives are definitely an improvement so if you can get them
then do those price gets up there if you need larger capacities. Ideally
in redundant config (raid 10 or similar).

CPU - basically higher clock frequency results in faster operation. EDB
server is multi-threaded but each connection gets its own thread so
3.0GHz will serve things theoretically faster than 2.0GHz (again depends
on amount of computation vs disk access and such factors in real life so
you might not see that much improvement).

RAM - this one really depends on usage and caching and while 64bit edb
server will have larger memory space it might not take any advantage of
it. Look at edb server memory consumption and unless it's in 600-800+ MB
then ram alone won't likely make much difference.


> Is it worth spending extra and over-specifing on:
> * GPU
> * Network adapters (given that lots of users will be hitting the server)

GPU - AFAIK no benefit today at all.

Network adapters - pretty much anything i've seen these days ships with
built-in dual gigabit NICs so i doubt you'll come close to filling that
- don't know your usage pattern but SMEs rarely need to go beyond this.

The only time one should consider going beyond is if you were to run a
hypervisor (windows/vvmware esxi etc) and whole bunch of VMs on top that
all use lot of network bandwidth.

We've been recommending a VM these days for our customers (many don't
like another dedicated server) and serve hundreds of clients off a
single VM (our larger sites are still dbisam but general usage idea
remains similar between these). We do usually run up to 4 dbisam server
instances for load balancing and redundancy

Raul