IDS 9.4 multithread help with new hardware

I am looking at a Sun cool thread server to replace a Sun v880 server that is going back on a lease soon. My interest in the cool thread server is power/heat reduction. We have a small computer room that has maxed out our air conditioning. I am being told the cool thread servers will only perform well with apps that use many threads. My 9.4 oninit process is never using more than 2 threads. Is there a way to tune how many threads the oninit process can use? Cool Thread link: http://cooltools.sunsource.net/cooltst/ Thanks Gary Quiring

Gary Quiring wrote: > I am looking at a Sun cool thread server to replace a Sun v880 server > that is going back on a lease soon. My interest in the cool thread > server is power/heat reduction. We have a small computer room that > has maxed out our air conditioning. > > I am being told the cool thread servers will only perform well with > apps that use many threads. My 9.4 oninit process is never using more > than 2 threads. > Actually your oninit processes use many many threads, at least one per client connection and several more for polling and other internal overhead activities. The reason you are not seeing them at the OS level is that they are not OS threads. IDS has its own thread library and all threads except the main thread and the OS KAIO thread are implemented internally using this library. There are two reasons for this. The first is simply practical, when the original Online Dynamic Server v6.00 was written there were at least three competing threading models plus the windows thread model and Informix did not want to have to support all of those differing models each with their own quirks, failings, and features. The second and more important reason is that by managing its own threads using a dedicated thread manager and context control specifically designed to support IDS's needs. IDS can process many more thread context switches than any OS level thread library. Now the real question is: will IDS be able to take good advantage of the internal architecture of the Cool Thread Server to run even faster? I don't know. You'll have to test it yourself. But please post the results of any testing you do here. As far as how can you tune IDS to take best advantage of multiple processor and multi-core processors? You can start more CPU VPs. I did some testing back in the days of 400-500 MHZ processors. On Sun processors faster than 450MHZ 2 CPU VPs per processor works well. With the more recent 1.2GHZ single core processors I've seen as many as 3 CPU VPs per processor run with good results. On the dual core 2.2GHZ Ultra Sparc IV processors, I have not known anyone to try running more than 4 per core - though using my old benchmark tests as a guide - each core could support up to five CPU VPs (IBM believes that Sparc dual core processors are equivalent to about 1.5 cores at the rated speed so that would mean the ability to support up to 7 CPU VPs per processor or 3-4 per core). Art S. Kagel Oninit > Is there a way to tune how many threads the oninit process can use? > > Cool Thread link: > http://cooltools.sunsource.net/cooltst/ > > Thanks > Gary Quiring > _______________________________________________ > Informix-list mailing list > Informix-list@iiug.org > http://www.iiug.org/mailman/listinfo/informix-list > > >