Re: SCO Open Server and Informix 7.3 - How far can I go with this platform??

From: Gary Quiring <gquiring@netlabs.net> > >I'm running Informix 7.3 on SCO OpenServer 5.0.5. We are using a Dell >6300 Server which has 4 Xeon 400mhz 1meg cache chips. The server has >4 gig of Ram and raid 5 10,000 rpm disks (Yes I know I need Raid 1+0). > >The server does order entry, financials, warehousing etc. for around >130 concurrent users. The question/problem is we bought a company and >will be doubling the user count in coming months. > >The server is having problems related to kernel tuning when you do a >netstat -m. We are having usocket errors and failures in mblks. SCO >seems to have no answers but to blame it on Informix and we paid >Informix to look at the system and basically blame it on SCO. Gee >what a surprise! :-) It's OK, I once installed Oracle on a SCO box and 1 user shut it down. :-) >Bottom line is the server dies at least once a day and requires a >reboot. Unusual. Have you had someone check the hardware and NIC? Do you have all the latest patches? Do you have the right drivers for all your bits and bobs? >Is Solaris 7 for the Intel platform a better solution? Do I really >need to goto a UltraSparc platform? I priced out a 4 chip UltraSparc >and was in the 250K area with DLT, 4 gig, 18 drives (18 gig each) and >other stuff (rack, Veratas etc). The config is around 3 times more >costly than a similiar Intel XEON server. Yep. I don't really like Solaris for Intel. (To tell you the truth, I don't like it much for SPARC, either! :-) Have you looked at HP or IBM? Or a Penguin box? >I'm just looking for any input that some of you have had with the >various platforms. It *really* doesn't sound like an Informix hassle, and that box should really cope with your projected growth. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

On Thu, 30 Mar 2000 11:08:57 BST, "Obnoxio The Clown" <obnoxio@hotmail.com> wrote: >It's OK, I once installed Oracle on a SCO box and 1 user shut it down. :-) > >>Bottom line is the server dies at least once a day and requires a >>reboot. > >Unusual. Have you had someone check the hardware and NIC? Do you have all >the latest patches? Do you have the right drivers for all your bits and >bobs? I changed the NIC from an Intel Pro 100 to a 3Com 905. It has the latest driver( d version). SCO is updated with the latest patches. (rs505c, rs497c, oss600a). Once a reboot is done, the server works fine for a few hours and then bang, usocket error, buffer headers, and class 4-10 failures when looking at netstat -m. NFS dies, telnet sessions get bumped and well it just stinks!! >Yep. I don't really like Solaris for Intel. (To tell you the truth, I don't >like it much for SPARC, either! :-) Have you looked at HP or IBM? Or a >Penguin box? I was given the impression that Informix likes Sun and they do most of their development on it? An Informix rep from the New Jersey office recommended a Sun platform for better stability. But again, I don't know Informix, I do have a lot of experience with SCO OpenServer, and usually it works fine. Gary Quiring

Gary Quiring wrote: > >Yep. I don't really like Solaris for Intel. (To tell you the truth, I don't > >like it much for SPARC, either! :-) Have you looked at HP or IBM? Or a > >Penguin box? > > I was given the impression that Informix likes Sun and they do most of > their development on it? An Informix rep from the New Jersey office > recommended a Sun platform for better stability. But again, I don't > know Informix, I do have a lot of experience with SCO OpenServer, and > usually it works fine. A tad bit of information here might be in order. Like any company, Informix has to chose on some platform standard to develop and yes that platform is solaris. But it was not chosen for stability reasons or such. Much of development time is spent debugging so we have to be able to easily work our way through dumps and such. That means that we need to avoid 'byte-swapped' platforms simply because that makes it much more difficult to debug a dump. Otherwise, when looking through a raw dump instead of 0x12345678, we'd be looking for 0x78563412. So that eliminates most intel based platforms. Also since we have to be able to correctly analyze shared memory dumps, we have to be able to control where the shared memory segment is located in memory. Otherwise during the manual debugging of a shmdump it would be difficult to look at memory based off of a pointer. Thus HP is not a good choice because it does not support a guarenteed base address for shared memory segments. Finally, when we had to make a decision on a developement platform, we really needed to have a desktop solution that would also function identically to a large system. Each engineer needs to be able to reboot his system many times a day during the developement/testing process. At the time that we decided on a developement platform, there were not all that many desktop UNIX systems. These are the reasons that Solaris was chosen. Not because of any stability reasons. When the product is ported to the other platforms, they go through the same test suites that were done on the basic Solaris release. In fact, in order to be able to add newly developed code into the system, we have to also be able to build/test the produce on systems other than Solaris. Currently this is done on NT, simply because that is the system that is most foreign to Solaris. Finally we do not restrict the beta program to Solaris customers only. The try very hard to include several platforms in the beta process. Thus by the time the beta program is over, we will have tested,debugged, and such on several of the major platforms. I know that recently I was having to debug 9.21 on Linux and DEC as part of the beta/roll-out of 9.21. So it is not a case where Informix considers in any way that one platform is more stable than another. > > > Gary Quiring -- Madison Pruet =========================================== Enterprise Replication Product Developement Dallas, Texas Informix Software ===========================================