Jurgen Welz
jwelz at hotmail.com
Thu Mar 4 09:46:55 CST 2010
I have recently assisted our parent company head office in updating my application to work with a newly deployed environment. in the past, we had 4 separate regional servers and a number of shared application and file servers supporting 65 concurrent users. Just over a year ago we switched from an mdb backend to a straight ODBC linked Sql Server setup because of 'disk or network' errors that continued after the switch to Sql Server. It turns out there was a problem on the file server hosting the front end. The new deployment is hosted on some serious hardware with 14 virtual machines run in 2 switchable banks and a pair of test servers for trying out service packs and new software installs. A set of emergency backup servers is housed across the street in a separate buildings. Additional servers can be built and deployed by scripts in a matter of an hour and a half. There are huge permanent Cat diesel backup generators in place. We now have 5 time zones set up on the servers based on the IP of the thin clients and several of the offices are moving up to fiber optic connections to the virtual servers. The problem is that the system is slower than it has ever been. We were trouble shooting some complaints yesterday and in my thin client session on one of the machines and another users session on the same machine, an inactive instance of my frontend on those sessions was sharing 100% of the cpu between the two Access applications. I deployed an older version of the front end that predated the change in environment and things are not improving. While the older environment was occasionally overwhelmed by resource demands, the problem arises far more frequently now despite the fact that we have provided significant increases to the hardware and the load balancer does a great job of ensuring that the number of users on any one server is well below the prior spec. When Access pins the processor at 100%, every other persons session on that VM essentially freezes. Ciao Jürgen Welz Edmonton, Alberta jwelz at hotmail.com _________________________________________________________________ Live connected with Messenger on your phone http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9712958