Informix platform selection

Hello all, Currently we run Informix 9.2.1 (32 bit) on an aging HP L2000 (dual 360MHz PA-RISC, 1Gb memory, software RAID) and we are now looking at replacing it with something that will give a decent (x3?) performance boost, most probably a 4-way server, hardware RAID, and lots more memory (4Gb+). Currently I'm looking at a Linux (RedHat) server x86 (Zeon or Opteron) as our most likely substitute O/S, but I'm also considering Solaris and HP-UX/Itanium. We will most probably upgrade to 9.4.0 as part of the migration. FYI our database is a rather modest 16Gb, with about 150 concurrent connections. My questions for you are: - What are your experiences of running Informix on any of these platforms and are there any curveballs I should be wary of? - I'm told that 4-way servers are the performance 'sweet spot' for Linux - true? - Can I expect any sort of performance boost by upgrading to 9.4.0? - Is there any real advantage to going to 64-bit Informix, and if so, what is the migration path like? Simply a binary upgrade or is there more to it? Thanks for your time. Jason Dinsdale

Jason Dinsdale wrote: > > Hello all, > > Currently we run Informix 9.2.1 (32 bit) on an aging HP L2000 (dual > 360MHz PA-RISC, 1Gb memory, software RAID) and we are now looking at > replacing it with something that will give a decent (x3?) performance > boost, most probably a 4-way server, hardware RAID, and lots more > memory (4Gb+). Currently I'm looking at a Linux (RedHat) server x86 > (Zeon or Opteron) as our most likely substitute O/S, but I'm also > considering Solaris and HP-UX/Itanium. We will most probably upgrade > to 9.4.0 as part of the migration. > > FYI our database is a rather modest 16Gb, with about 150 concurrent > connections. > > My questions for you are: > > - What are your experiences of running Informix on any of these > platforms and are there any curveballs I should be wary of? > - I'm told that 4-way servers are the performance 'sweet spot' for > Linux - true? > - Can I expect any sort of performance boost by upgrading to 9.4.0? > - Is there any real advantage to going to 64-bit Informix, and if so, > what is the migration path like? Simply a binary upgrade or is there > more to it? > > Thanks for your time. > > Jason Dinsdale Hi, my direct comparisons of Linux on Intel P4/3000 vs Sun machines of different type I can sum up like this: If you equate Linux = RedHat, go for Sun, else expect problems of every type. If you use SuSE 8.2 or 9.0 you can expect this: How much more you can get out of your Linux box depends on 2 main factors: your motherboard & your HW RAID controllers. On a motherboard having 3 PCI busses (64bit/66Mhz) (look at Tyan for instance) and using 2 or 3 Escalade SATA controllers (www.3ware.com) you will get approx 2 times the performance for approx 40% of the $$$ compared to a modern 4 CPU Sun box or SunFire single sysboard domain and 500 GB disk. Why? Because SATA disks are incredible cheap (like 1 USD/GB) and because a 3 x 160 MB SATA RAID 10 (=0.5 TB) + 1 spare disk + 1 Escalade controller w. 8 SATA ports is 1600 UDS and you are able to read and write 40K buffers from/to the RAID 10 / sec (sustained, 65000 diskreads / sec peak). Add a second RAID 10, do some balancing of your chunks and you can expect to see >90.000 diskreads / sec. 2 dual threaded P4/3000 have a *very* high integer arithmetic performance compared to each and every RISC architecture, I ever was working on. You will see >180.000 buffreads per second if you do I/O-less scans thru your buffpool. SuSE support for dual threaded P4s is perfect. Install out of the box (DVD) and run - you won't see any problems. And the huge CPU cache memory is also a nice thing and a perfect fit with a memory workload typical for the INFORMIX engine. YMMV dic_k -- Richard Kofler SOLID STATE EDV Dienstleistungen GmbH Vienna/Austria/Europe