Re: 50% increase in porocessor

Juan R. Guzman wrote: > > I'm going to buy 2 Ultra 3000's with 4 processors and Solaris 2.5.1 to > host an application with On-line 7.21. One will be an online system and > the other will be DSS. I have the option of going with processors of > 167 mhz or 250mhz both with 1 mb of external cache. That's 50% increase > in processor speed. Does anybody have an idea of what performance gain > overall I should expect with Informix on both machines? > > thanks, Juan, We have a similiar configuration to the one you described. We have two Ultra 4000's with 2 processors (167 mhz), 512mb RAM, and each running Solaris 2.5.1. We are in the process of upgrading these machines to handle some explosive growth at our company. Our current performance is good (to great). A few issues confront us. (1) Should we just add two additional cpu's? (2) Significantly increase memory (in our case doubling it)? (3) Or do options 1 and 2? Because we are not CPU bound, our first intensions will be to add the memory. Everything likes more memory. With more memory, we want to place as much of the database in memory as possible. We are going to start with temporary tables in memory. Since I am new to Informix, I am not sure of the details but I know it possible. Anyone have experience doing this? Down the road, if we determine that we are becoming CPU bound, we will mostly like upgrade our processors as well. A final thought. With the Sun Ultra's, if you have a second system board, distribute the memory across both boards. This will give the benefit of Sun's memory interleaving capabilities. Steve Romankiw Executive Risk Inc.