February 28, 2002 at 7:20 am
Good Morning to all.
Last night I was talking to my manager and he said that the new release of our own application will be directed to all our clients via internet. Great!! He projects that we will have a maximum of 4000 users and a minimum of 2000. Of course not all of them at the same time. With our numbers we calculate that we could have at least 200 concurrent users at any given time, but I need to plan ahead and be prepared for the whole 4000 if this ever happen (maybe never)
I read about planning for this event here (don't remember who posted this issue or the date) and came back to read it this morning, but could not find the item.
Any suggestions on how to be prepared for this event? At this time we have individual databases in SQL Server 2000 Windows NT SP 6a for the majority of our clients. The new release will be ready in a couple of months and will like to have some orientation on this issue.
Thanks again for all your assistance.
February 28, 2002 at 9:34 am
this will be tough to plan for. A few questions and suggestions:
1. How many users (concurrent and max) do you have now?
2. Is this a web based application now?
3. Do you have baselines for CPU, Memory, Disk I/O, etc for the current system?
With this info, you can start to extrapolate the stuff you need. A few things to suggest, kind of in order of resources needed.
1. Upgrade to W2k. Handles memory and disk I/O better.
2. Separate data from logs for EACH database on separate physical devices. Will help balance the load. If you can, spread out the disks across multiple controllers.
3. Implement partitioned views, distributed would be better. Even if the view is a single server or two servers, it gives you a layer under which to expand later to multiple databases.
4. Tweak the code to minimize the business logic in the db. You can more easily scale web servers or application servers, so having the business logic, ordering, manipulating results, etc. there can really save some load on the server.
Steve Jones
February 28, 2002 at 1:26 pm
Thanks Steve. Yes we have requested enough hardware to run this new release.
At this time we are in NT4 SP 6a and SQL Server 2K, but the new environment will be much much better. Two data server will be 4 and 4 web servers will be 9 with enough memory, disk i/o, CPU etc.
Users at this time could be 15 per office (81 offices around the country) with constant traffic to the web site. They usually come in in the morning and did not logoff until the time comes to go home in the evening. So We can say that at any given time we have an average of 850.
The application is web based in a very weird set, due to the system our client offices are running. A program called BBX (I think this program was DOS great-grand -father!!)
When I came in, they have all data and log files in the same drive. I changed that by creating data and logs in different drives.
Can I run the store procs, triggers, etc running calculations in a different hard drive and the data in a different one? I read some place that this can be done and will help the performance. It is kind of splitting the database in two. Am I right or I did dreamed?
Thanks again
February 28, 2002 at 1:38 pm
The stored procs and views, etc. will mostly run in memory, so more is better. You can separate the data, however, using filesgroups and place heavily used data on separate drives to speed the I/O transfer rate.
I'd be sure you have SMP servers with room to grow, so I'd go with a 4 way, even though I might only put in 2. That way you can grow. As much RAM as possible and as many drives as you can get.
Sounds like you are relatively prepared. One other thing, be sure you have the bandwidth.
Steve Jones
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