Re: Q: Informix req. dedicated Host?

Daniel Moore wrote: > > We are beginning the process of adding enhancements to an existing > software product which will result in a high utilization of Informix. > The product itself does image processing (eg. image enhancement/OCR/ICR > all of which is rather CPU intensive) > > One issue at hand is how we are going to organize our computing resources > in terms of task distribution to get the highest performance possible out > of our system (of course with the minimal amount of wasted resources). > We will very likely have a primary high performance system which will > serve as a 'compute server'. We also plan to have a system act as an NFS > file server from which the Compute Server and about 50 other clients will > mount fundemental filesystems. This will be done via 100meg FDDI where > performance is required and 10meg Ethernet for less demanding systems. > > The question is this: how CPU intensive is Informix in a transaction > rich environment (in terms of both NFS and Informix transactions). Could > a single system manage both Informix *and* NFS or should Informix have a > system dedicated to it? > > We utilize Sun hardware and have a 4 CPU Sun Sparc 20 (4x100Mhz) system > and a 2 CPU Sun Ultra Enterprise 3000 which we could dedicate to the task. > I'd be very interested in hearing not only recommendations but also how > others are utilizing their computing resources in heavy computational plus > Database applications. > I don't think I can answer your question without knowing more detailed configuration. For example, your network topology. However, I can provide our system configuration for your reference. Hardware: Our servers varies from Sparc 20 with one CPU, Sparc 20 with 2 CPUs, Sparc 1000E with 4 CPUs to Sparc 2000E with 12 CPUs. Hard disk size varies from 24GB to one terabyte. Majority of our clients are PCs. Our network is token ring switch running 16MBit per second. There are a few ethernet and ATM links in our system. Software: 60% of our system has been delivered and is in production. The system we are working on is a document imaging/workflow system with OCR/ICR, COM/COLD, Optical/Tape Jukeboxes, ... etc. But our OCR/ICR is performed by PC clients without using Sparcs. Some image editing functions need database connection, others do not. Sometimes, images are scanned into files and then loaded into database. Sometimes, images are scanned directly into database. I am not sure whether you want to store your images in the database -- this may totally change the possible answer to your question. Since we are using KAIO for all raw devices and have large hard disk configured for database, CPU power is tightly related to the server performance. It does sound strange that we do not have CPU intensive applications at Sparcs, yet CPU power significantly affects performance. We have several NFS file systems. Whenever it is possible, we use remote copy (rcp) instead of "cp" to avoid the performance problem with NFS. We have two Sparc 20s (one CPU for each server) running both NFS and OnLine. The performance tuning tool keeps complaining about CPU overloaded and the shortage of RAM. We will add another CPU to each of these two servers within a month. There are four NFS servers (one CPU sparc 20s)that will become our bottleneck (they are not fully in production yet.) We are considering to buy special hardware to bump up the performance of NFS. But none of these four Sparcs have OnLine. They are dedicated NFS servers. Your NFS server will be slow regardless whether you have OnLine installed with it or not. NFS protocol is a stateless protocol which causes NFS slow. Does it help? Chao