Re: sybase system 10 limitation of 4 processors ?

In article <lchutsonD7K3zE.H7p@netcom.com> lchutson@netcom.com (Lawrence Hutson) writes: >What exactly do you mean support for more than one processor? I have >heard this talk before, but I was under the same conclusion as >Dr. Chen that most DBMS are IO bound. By MP support (in the context of DB servers,) people usually mean that a DB server can utilize multiple CPUs to process multiple tasks at the same time. Sybase, as well as practically everybody else, does support MP. MP support is important even if the environment is IO-bound, for various reasons that I don't want to get into here. By the way, architecturally, System 10 can support much more than 4 processors. No problem. At the issue is not really "MP support beyond 4 processors" per se, but the "performance scalability beyond 4 processors", which, as some posters point out (as well as reported on trade journals,) will be addressed by Sybase in their upcoming System 11. What I said in a previous post is that the widely circulated Sybase "performance scalability" problem usually only shows up in CPU-bound environment, but most of the installations are IO-bound. To most Sybase users, this scalability problem is really an academic issue, and I believe this is the reason why Sybase did not address this issue in System 10. (This scalability problem of Sybase has been known in the technical community for several years. It's not a new issue at all.) Usually, if you throw in enough memory and disk controllers and drives (and if your platform has enough slots for them,) and design your physical database placement carefully, you can bring your particular environment to be CPU-bound. However, in practice, very few people are willing to spend the kind of money and effort to do this, and in most cases, there is probabily no business need to do this anyway. So, most of the DB installations out there are IO-bound. -- Paul Chen, Ph.D. consulting at DEC Disclaimer: My opinions only!