On 12.02.2012 02:58, Ben Coman wrote:
Just thinking laterally (since I don't have the experience to apply to the analysis), a practical business solution is to throw hardware at the problem - particularly for a legacy application on old hardware. One site I worked at was having issues with the overnight posting of the days accounts taking upwards of 12 hours. The application had outgrown its initial design. This was brought down to 15 minutes by upgrading the RAM and also to Serial Attached SCSI RAID10. The other thing to consider is the decreasing cost of solid state storage (which I've heard of good stuff but haven't used myself yet)
While I wouldn't argue against buying hardware I would first make sure I understand the problem so I know what to spend my money on. You also want to make sure you're not suffering from something "stupid" like a configuration error or a missing index. There are sometimes small and cheap changes that can have a dramatic impact.
If you're running 5 year old hardware sure, absolutely consider an upgrade. Sure, SSDs can help dramatically.
Cheers Philippe
