Long running output

[Mike Schwartz]

> One of my client's has an output (creates a csv file) that takes a long
time to
> run.  Last Saturday, on their system, it took just over 4 hours.  On
Tuesday

[Snip]

> processor and more memory.  It may take just running this output directly
on
> the server to have it finish in a reasonable amount of time.

> Richard Kreiss
----- ----- -----
     I think you answered your own question.  Remember that 40,000 records
per item must be dragged over your network cable from the server to the
workstation in order to do all the calculations.  If the calculations are
making any changes to these records, all 40,000 for each item must be
written BACK to the Windows server over your network cable.  That is a heck
of a lot of data to transfer over your network cables.

     I've had a few customers try to convert from Unix  to MS-Windows.
Every time it was a disaster.  One customer in Chicago used to run a 1 hour
batch of reports in the evening.  After they converted over to a MS-Windows
server, they started the batch from a workstation on Friday evening and the
batch wasn't done running on Monday!

     Running the batch from the Windows NT server console was a lot better.
The reports would finish up in about 4 hours.  (Their new Windows NT server
was 4 times slower than their old Xenix computer was...)  

    This was OK for the weekend reports, but users couldn't run any of the
other reports they used to run from their workstations.  Schedules that used
to take a minute or two to print on the old Xenix server took hours to
generate and print via their Windows network.

     As a matter of fact I gained the customer because they wanted me to
build them a new Unix server and move them BACK to Unix.

     So, your options are:

     1)  Install faster network cabling and network switches

     2)  Run all the long reports from the Windows Server console.

     3)  Or, I guess I should add:  convert them to one of the Unixes.

     I am just curious enough that, if the data is not too proprietary or
confidential,  I wonder if I could get a dataset from you to run on one of
my Unix servers???

Mike Schwartz