filepro RAM limit

[Fairlight]

On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 09:28:11AM -0400, scooter6, the prominent pundit,
witicized:
> I have a customer who is running filepro 5.0.09R4 on a SCO OpenServer
> 5.0.5platform --
> 
> Hardware is a Dell Poweredge Server - 2.4GHz processor

I note you omit the OS...which would be relevant to this discussion in some
circumstances.

> Everything has been working great for about 3 yrs now -- I decided to
> upgrade their RAM -- they only had 512MB -- so, I'm at client's site --
> ordered 2GB from Dell and installed it last night -- everything booted fine
> and ran a couple of processes last night - including some indexes - and it
> seemed a bit faster - just not REALLY faster like I would have thought --
> 
> During their series of night time processes that runs nightly, it wasn't any
> faster at all to complete -- still takes about an hour and a half ???
> 
> Anyone have any suggestions on why the filepro processes wouldn't be
> noticably quicker to run ???
> Thanks

Well, if your benchmark is rebuilding indexes and doing reports, you've
upgraded the wrong components.  Those tasks use very little memory by
comparison, and your main bottleneck is disk I/O speed--especially on an
index rebuild, since that's almost all disk I/O.  Faster drives and bus
speeds would help.

The key is whether or not you were maxing memory usage to begin with.  If
you weren't, then upgrading the amount of RAM is meaningless for this
use--a waste of money.  The only way more RAM will increase speed is if
you're going into swap before an upgrade and not needing swap after it.
fP is a low-memory-consumption application, mostly affected by how many
instances of its programs are running concurrently.  First place to look is
not RAM, it's hard drive throughput and performance.

mark->
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