In article <6qdb1p$bid$1_at_garnet.tc.umn.edu>,
hause011_at_garnet.tc.umn.edu (Steven Hauser) wrote:
>
> The phoney baloney test of using creaky old unix on a puny old box against a
> bunch of 4 CPU NT boxes is the usual way of rigging results.
>
> NT at this time does not scale, is unstable, is expensive. Face the
> facts squarely and present a reasonable test. No one in their right
> mind would ever pick an NT box for something that is bigger than a
> GB or two of data or needs 24x7 run time.
>
> I laugh at your lame 'test'. HAH.
>
> --
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> Steven Hauser, hause011_at_tc.umn.edu
> Phone: (612)626-7135
> Fax: (612)625-6853
> ---------------------------------------------------------
>
Your reply reminds me of the typical *flame-wars* over on comp.object
or alt.destroy.microsoft or even rec.games.computer.ultima.dragons.
At no moment in time have I suggested abandoning Oracle on Unix for
Oracle on NT. As a matter of fact we're running > 50 Oracle servers on
a variety of Unix stations. I don't know whether there are *any* Oracle
on NT databases in production at the European Commission other than on
a departmental level. Acces to our Oracle servers can be from 40 to 1500
potential concurrent users. But the data I provided where partial extracts
from extensive in-hous testing about the feasability of Oracle on NT and
to compare actual performance against the spec-sheet. I provided this
information to help potential users make up their mind. I never suggested
NT to be a better choice than UNIX. To complete the picture I include a few
further extracts from our report
- The values reported for Unix and for Windows NT can not be compared because
of the completely different architectures of the machines (processors, RAM,
disks, …) and, therefore, no generalisation can be made from those figures.
They are only shown to provide a point of reference for those who know that
kind of workstation.
- The disk configuration (1 striped partition over 4 different physical
disks, 2 striped partitions over 2 different physical disks or 4 different
partitions each one on a different physical disk) doesn't seem to have big
impact on the performance of the response time. However, the amount of
available RAM has a great impact in the performance. The configuration
ECC1-D1 (with double amount of RAM) offered a response time of approximately
half the response time of the other Windows NT configurations (Madrid-D1,
Madrid-D2 and Madrid-D4). However, we can see that for 99 users the numbers
loose the 1:2 relationship and are more similar. This could mean that
swapping started at that stage in all configurations and, then, the disk
activity becomes the main determinant of the response time. The degradation
in response time is not meaningful since the heavy clients resemble more
batch processes than interactive clients. Additionally, increasing the number
of clients increased the amount of data to deal with because of the way the
clients are implemented (as explained above). Therefore, the performance
degradation observed in these tests does not represent the perfor-mance
degradation that may occur in an application by raising the number of users.
While the response time has increased noticeably, the main conclusion to
retain is that Oracle continued to behave correctly (without giving errors)
while the workload increased provided that it had enough resources. Error
messages were obtained for higher number of users because of lack of redolog
space. When additional space was allocated to the redolog files the tests
executed without problems. A closing remark concerning the simplification of
administrative tasks gained on Windows NT. The test instance required a huge
SGA to be created. In order to do so, modifications have to be made to the
kernel in the Unix environment: first, to allow for more and bigger shared
memory segments and, then, to increase the number of processes and
semaphores. Once this was set up, the tests could be started only to make the
machine crash because there wasn't enough swap space. On Windows NT, only the
parameters of the init.ora needed to be set up in order to have the instance
running.
- In our experience NT servers need to rebooted almost twice per month whereas
UNIX servers often run without incident for several months.
Regards
--
Oliver Willandsen - European Commission
http://europa.eu.int
All remarks are my own and do not necessarily
reflect official European Commission policy
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Received on Fri Aug 07 1998 - 02:43:25 CDT
