[AccessD] Solid State Disk performance

Well Drew, it appears that memory is my bottleneck.  My server only has 8 gigs of RAM (in four 
slots).  I could put 16 in it but 4 gig dims made a brief appearance a year ago or so then 
disappeared.  So I am stuck at 8 gigs unless they reappear.

Two VMs run just fine, even with 3 gigs of ram each (needed for the application).  Running three, 
even dropping the RAM down to 2.25 gigs causes the server to slow to a crawl as the swap file comes 
into play.

Sigh.

It looked so promising.  I don't have the funds to go to server grade hardware with 8 or more dimm 
slots, registered memory and all that.

But in the end, two virtual machines running full speed is better than one, and I will take what I 
can get.  At least I can stop testing and go back to work.

;)

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com


Drew Wutka wrote:
> Why don't you double that, by getting a RAID controller and two of those
> drives, to stripe them?  It'll read twice as fast!
> 
> Drew
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
> [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of jwcolby
> Sent: Wednesday, April 01, 2009 9:18 AM
> To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
> Subject: Re: [AccessD] Solid State Disk performance
> 
> In this particular case I am just installing the application on a VM and
> then copying the VM so that 
> I run one instance in each VM.  Tech support for the application told me
> that as long as I have a 
> license to use the software I could run more than one copy to speed up
> my processing.  The 
> application does most of the processing locally so it is just my own
> hardware taking the hit.  It 
> does upload a file for post processing but they told me I could do this
> (which is really pretty nice 
> of them) so I am not violating any license.
> 
> Running it in a VM allows me to move the application to a different
> server if I need without 
> uninstalling / reinstalling / obtaining the key for the new install etc.
> Obviously it also allows 
> me to run multiple instances to speed up the processing.
> 
> I process huge tables, for example last night / today I am processing
> about 50 million records.  My 
> time to process (on an instance of the program) is about 4-5 million
> records / hour, however there 
> is upload / process / download time on the remote server.  Together the
> total comes to about 20 
> minutes per million records so it will take about 17 hours or so to
> process the table.  If I can 
> throw multiple VMs at it I can cut that by at least two, possibly three
> or even four.  Nine hours is 
> better than 17, 5 hours is better yet.
> 
> We shall see.
> 
> The SSD gives me extremely high (RAID 0 like) bandwidth, but it also
> gives me extremely high IO 
> processing as well as extremely low latency.  For a process like this
> where the system does nothing 
> but read and process, the performance boost versus a hard disk is
> astounding.  And all for a measly 
> $125!
> 
> John W. Colby
> www.ColbyConsulting.com
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