sizing question

[Dave Haas]

Hello all.

I have a rather ambiguous question. It is more of a 'what has your
experience been' question than anything else. I'm trying to gather some
informal statistics on what kind of load a 'properly' configured database
can handle on a given machine.

Some background:

The company that I own is a large way through developing a new app that will
essentially replace the functionality of an Exchange server and add quite a
few more toys and whistles (this is in no way a post to attract attention to
that however). At the moment we would consider the design reasonable
(appropriate use of bind variables, proper index and schema design, etc,
etc). It's being developed in Delphi and Kylix and will sit on top of one
or more Oracle instances, possibly replicated.

The question(s) that we would like to get a better handle on are:

Given an appropriately designed app how many concurrent connections could a
db be reasonably expected to handle on, say, a 4 way Wintel box? How about
a 8 Way Solaris machine? Would it be reasonable to expect a 4 way Wintel box
to be able to handle 500 concurrent users sending/receiving email, adding
contacts, scheduling meetings, that sort of thing. Would people suggest a
farm of cheapie Linux boxen or one big honkin Solaris machine?

I realize these are extremely difficult questions to answer and so what I
would really like is for anyone who is willing to maybe send a brief note
saying something to the effect of 'this is our app, this is what it does,
this is the box, this is the load it handles'.

Any and all replies would be appreciated :)

Regards,

Dave Haas

[Rauf Sarwar]

"Dave Haas" <davehaas@--nospam--hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<Ul5P9.53115$k13.1631373@news0.telusplanet.ne t>...

> Hello all.
>
> I have a rather ambiguous question. It is more of a 'what has your
> experience been' question than anything else. I'm trying to gather some
> informal statistics on what kind of load a 'properly' configured database
> can handle on a given machine.
>
> Some background:
>
> The company that I own is a large way through developing a new app that will
> essentially replace the functionality of an Exchange server and add quite a
> few more toys and whistles (this is in no way a post to attract attention to
> that however). At the moment we would consider the design reasonable
> (appropriate use of bind variables, proper index and schema design, etc,
> etc). It's being developed in Delphi and Kylix and will sit on top of one
> or more Oracle instances, possibly replicated.
>
> The question(s) that we would like to get a better handle on are:
>
> Given an appropriately designed app how many concurrent connections could a
> db be reasonably expected to handle on, say, a 4 way Wintel box? How about
> a 8 Way Solaris machine? Would it be reasonable to expect a 4 way Wintel box
> to be able to handle 500 concurrent users sending/receiving email, adding
> contacts, scheduling meetings, that sort of thing. Would people suggest a
> farm of cheapie Linux boxen or one big honkin Solaris machine?
>
> I realize these are extremely difficult questions to answer and so what I
> would really like is for anyone who is willing to maybe send a brief note
> saying something to the effect of 'this is our app, this is what it does,
> this is the box, this is the load it handles'.
>
> Any and all replies would be appreciated :)
>
> Regards,
>
> Dave Haas

I work for an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software company. Our
application is thin client with Oracle on the backend. Our customers
run our application on Windows NT4/2K to all flavors of Oracle
compatable Unix/Linux servers.

With our fully loaded application, which means most components
installed that could result in > 21000 total non-system objects... We
have our customers running our application diversely from 100 users on
a low end server to > 5000 users on a high end Unix server.

It all depends how you want to use Oracle in your environment.
Generally speaking, you will see that high availability medium to
VLDB's (Very Large DataBase) run on medium to high end Unix servers.
However, in this day and age, Windows 2000 advanced servers from Dell
or Compaq can also handle a good size load. 500 concurrent users in
your environment can be handled by either Windows, Unix or Linux
servers. If you don't mind Windoze, then you can save a bundle $$$
over a high end Unix server and still buy yourself a powerfull server.
It all depends on what kind of shop you have.

Furthermore, database performance depends on more then just what kind
of server you have. You could run into bottlenecks if,
1) Your network speed is not good
2) Poorly designed/tuned database
3) Improperly sized server
4) Database is not properly utilizing memory, RAID level or load
balancing over different disks.
5) Poorly designed client application

to name a few.

Hope this helps
/Rauf Sarwar