Rapid once deployed too

[Mike Schwartz (PC Support)]

> >      Then the customer upgraded their 5-year old server to a dual Xeon
> box
> > with 4 gigs of RAM, and now the filePro web transactions run about 100
> times
> > as fast as they did on the old box.
> 
> No doubt that a XEON will actually run things much faster, but it's the
> bandying about of numbers like this that starts me wondering.  100 times
> faster?  So if it takes one second now, it was taking 100 seconds (1:40)
> on the old machine?  Why am I finding that improbable?

     I believe it was a Pentium 450 with 768 megs of Ram and a Raid-5 array
with 18-Gig SCSI drives.  It used to really bog down with 250 users hitting
it with filePro web requests.  Some transactions like "show me all the
invoicing detail for customer xyz for the past 18 months" were taking over 5
minutes to do all the lookups and return the data to a Unix command line
(not including web transfer or display time.)  Now these requests process so
fast (just a couple of seconds) that I can't get accurate timings on them,
but it's around a factor of 100.  I'm sure some of this is due to the new
SAN disk array that has it's own huge cache RAM.      

     I recall several other "light speed" jumps in technology, too.  Going
from Profile II on floppies to a Tandy 16 with a hard drive was a lightspeed
jump of at least 100 times.  It uses to take almost all afternoon to process
just one metal plating schedule report on the floppies, but that same report
printed in just a few minutes after we got the hard drive.  (My boss's boss
thought we would NEVER fill up an 8-meg hard drive, so he didn't splurge and
get the 15-meg!!!)

     Going from a Tandy 16 with 512K of Ram 8-meg hard drive to an IBM 286
with a 40-gig hard drive and 3 megs of Ram was the next huge jump; again I'd
say roughly 100 times the speed.  Now THAT was a light-speed jump in
performance.  I recall spending a full Saturday sitting around the office at
American Can listening to the old Tandy 8-meg hard drive chirp away just so
I could add several new fields to our order entry database and archive some
of the older orders.  After we migrated to the 286, I was flabbergasted that
I could do a similar job in 5 minutes.  

Mike Schwartz