Is 4000 users too high a number for filePro

[Kenneth Brody]

Quoting Lerebours, Jose (Thu, 9 Jun 2005 07:31:56 -0500):

> A question of scalability has come up and I need to
> provide a comprehensive answer.
>
> The question:
> How would filePro perform in an environment with 4000
> users and what kind of hardware will it need?
[...]

A lot depends on exactly what those 4000 users would be doing.

First, of course, is you need a system that would support 4000
simultaneous users in the first place.  That, in and of itself,
is no small feat.

Assuming you have a system that supports these 4000 users, plus
whatever non-filePro stuff might be going on, I wouldn't expect
that filePro itself would add much to the equation.  This, of
course, depends on what you are doing.  Having 4000 hunt-and-
peck typists entering data would probably not even be noticed
by today's high-end systems.  Having 4000 people generating
4000 simultaneous reports would probably bring most systems to
a crawl, regardless of the database.

Someone else posted about 4000 copies of a 500K dclerk would
require 2GB of RAM.  However, you have to remember that the
code segments are sharable, meaning that only one copy of the
executable is in memory, regardless of the number of processes
running it.  Only the data has separate copies.  You would
have to check how much memory the data segment requires in
your partiular database.

Now, as for limitations within filePro...

Currently, the lockfile format only supports 255 simultaneous
users in any given file.  (Some platforms support 64K users
with the lockfile, and we have sold 1024-user versions for
those platforms.  I have a feeling that if you were to pay for
a 4000-user license, fPTech could arrange a version that would
allow for 64K-user lockfiles as well.)  This limit has already
been increased in the next release, where the lockfile includes
32-bit counts, allowing a theoretical 2 billion simultaneous
users in each file.

So, what does this boil down to?

First, you need a system that supports and handles 4000 users,
and need to spec out what would be required for the non-filePro
part of the equation.  Beyond that, you need to be more specific
in just what these users will be doing in filePro in order to
get a more specific answer as to how much beyond the base system
you would need in order to support filePro.  However, except for
the above-mentioned lockfile issue, there is nothing inherent in
filePro that I am aware of that would limit the number of users
that could run it.

--
KenBrody at BestWeb dot net        spamtrap: <g8ymh8uf001 at sneakemail.com>
http://www.hvcomputer.com
http://www.fileProPlus.com