Hi all
I am pretty new to Baan and our company has a Baan IV c4 installation running on Windows NT SP4 on the following hardware

Dual P III Xeon 500
1 GB RAM
8x9.1 GB SCSI'S in RAID 5
2 GB Swap on 80GB IDE drive

We have about 25 Active concurrent users and during most of the day our CPU's are maxed out by SQL. When all 25 users are online,performance is really slow.

Just curious about what sort of loading other Baan Servers out there are running at.

Would be really nice to know what people are running

Hardware config.
Users
Typical Server Load

Thanks!

I presume you are on SQL 7 or above. If on SQL 6.5, that had very poor performance!

Same problem with me too. I have only 16 concurrent users.
I've moved all report generation outside of baan (in crystal reports), so much of server load is taken out.

mostly reports need a lot of processing, everytime a big report is generated the CPU usage comes to 100%, which also makes other processes slow. RAID5 also is instrumental in making the server slower.

sriram

Originally posted by EdHubbard
I presume you are on SQL 7 or above. If on SQL 6.5, that had very poor performance!

Yes we are using SQL 7 and performance is poor. SQL eats up around 800MB or so of physical memory during peak loads.

Originally posted by N. sriram

RAID5 also is instrumental in making the server slower.

I am not sure that the RAID 5 is the cause of the server slowing down (assuming that you have a good RAID card installed that does not eat CPU cycles.Even in the worst case a RAID card would not consume more than 10% of CPU time even under extensive read/writes)
I setup a performance counter in winNT and under peak loads the reads/writes total did not exceed a few hundred Kbytes/sec. (far below the capability of the Disk subsystem, even an old one such as the one we have)

I have a feeling that memory is the bottleneck. Today i will set up another perfomance counter to see how much swapping takes place under load for a few days.

could you ( EdHubbard and sriram and anyone else who reads this post:)) also please post some numbers about Disk I/O's and memory usage in your systems under a typical load? Just so that the bottleneck is easier to isolate

Thanks!

Our server physically has 1.7GB of RAM. The SQL process uses around 1GB of that so I think your memory is likely to be too low.
We have 4 x 400MHz Xeon processors and processor utilization averages 30%.

EdHubbard <--- How many concurrent users are on your server typically ?

Typically 25 - 30 users

Hmm interesting....you are probably right about the memory being too low. I am going to start some perf logs to monitor the Pagefile usage.

Low physical memory would translate to higher Paging right?

I think so. Our test server only has 1.2GB of RAM and it works ok - but it only has 1 or 2 users on at any time.