SE vs OL - Lets get to the crux.

Folks, Appreciate all of the suggestions/responses from you to my recent OnLine indexing performance degradation question I posted. I decided that I'd be better off biting the bullet and sitting on hold for several days to talk to tech support. Thanks for the advice and so on, but based on the response I don't think that this is the right forum to ask tech support questions. I'll get over the stumbling blocks behind the scenes. On the other hand, I do think think this is the right forum for one of the non-application-specific issues that was brought up. It has been repeatedly pointed out that OnLine doesn't show its performance increase at lower user numbers. I've been promised that OnLine is buttloads better when the user count goes up. I don't think so. TEST: o Put 50 users on each of two machines o One machine running OnLine o One running Standard Engine o Have all of the users pull up perform screens. o Have the users do nothing (easy). o Run database performance tests on each machine. I think you'll get very similar numbers to when there is a single user. I submit that the important factor in the equation is not the number of users, it is more likely the number or transactions per second, or the number of transactions per user per second. Having said that and feeling the incoming corrections in my peripheral conscience, I ask four things: 1) That we stick to the subject at hand. I don't want to hear about how performance is not the issue, because performance IS the issue. 2) If I'm wrong, what is the correct answer? What is that elusive most-important-factor (X), that as X increases, the performance of OnLine does not degrade as rapidly as Standard Engine. 3) How does a person measure this factor on his active system? How can I say with confidence that at my shop X = 4.63? 4) What is the break point? At what point do the performance gains that OnLine brings make up for its overhead costs? i.e. When X > 2. - john (john%elsouth@concert.net)