Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!rutgers!sun-barr!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!sdd.hp.com!hplabs!pyramid!infmx!aland
From: aland@infmx.UUCP (Colonel Panic)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Oracle & Number of Users
Summary: bus more important than MPU
Keywords: oracle users performance
Message-ID: <5131@infmx.UUCP>
Date: 1 Sep 90 20:55:10 GMT
References: <2399@mic.UUCP> <18383@frog.UUCP>
Reply-To: aland@infmx.UUCP (alan denney)
Organization: INFORMIX Professional Services ("Peace thru Normalization")
Lines: 36

In article <18383@frog.UUCP> barr@frog.UUCP (Chris Barr) writes:
>In article <2399@mic.UUCP>, gary@mic.UUCP (Gary Lewin) writes:
>> It is my understanding that on a 33 mhz, caching UN*X system with 16
>> megs of ram, up to 16 users could run Oracle at once.  At least
>> according to people at Oracle.
>> 1)  How many simultaneous users are <REALLY> able to use the above
>>     system with little or no performance degradation?
>
>In our experience, sql*forms applications which open many cursors can 
>                                                -----------------
>eat up the 15 meg (1 meg is lost on DOS architecture motherboards running
>Unix) with only 6 users.  However, we've also run 20 users, with each
>using very, very few open cursors.  The performance hit is in paging 
>...
>It's easy to recommend a 486 system, which at least will have the 
>option of upgrading to support > 16 Meg.  The vast majority of '386 
>motherboards have an AT architecture that won't go above 16; a few 
>go to 24 or 40.

Not anymore.  In my experience, most high performance 386 boxes will
support 24, 32, 40, 48, or 64 MB of memory.  (For example, all
currently-produced AT&T and Intel 386 boxes support 40MB or more).

The bigger problem is the ISA (AT) bus.  Since it can't handle DMA
beyond the 16MB boundary, UNIX has to go thru some hoops (and not
very solid ones, BTW) to remap the higher memory in the kernel.

If they will really need more memory, they would be better served by
a Micro Channel- or EISA-based machine, regardless of processor.

Or, get a database system that's less of a resource hog...     :-]   

--
Alan Denney  # aland@informix.com # {pyramid|uunet}!infmx!aland

There are only 3,734 known Denneys in North America.  Be nice to us.