[RBG7-L] - Re: Small Network

[Kenny Camp]

If you plan the eventual move to 1 Gig, always use Cat 5e or Cat 6.  A Cat 5 
will run fine at 100 mbs, but when we upgraded to 1 gig switches and NICs to 
speed up an accounting package's access to a Pervasive DB server, the 
performance went down until we replaced the Cat 5 cables.

Kenny Camp
IT Manager
Electro Enterprises
Oklahoma City, OK
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alastair Burr" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "RBG7-L Mailing List" <rbg7-l@rbase.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 17, 2005 2:24 AM
Subject: [RBG7-L] - Re: Small Network


About 10 years ago, when a WAN was installed at the company that I used to
work for, I used R:Base to prove that there was a problem on one leg by
copying a large file between fileservers.
Simply by copying the file a number of times, backwards and forwards,
between our office in London and the offices in Europe and putting the
destination name along with the date and start and finish times into a 
table
it was possible to build up evidence that one connection was slower.

The command file run automatically for a couple of hours overnight - when
there was no other traffic - for weeks until, eventually, it was 
discovered
that the supplying company has set-up one of the routers incorrectly.

After that, if ever there was a speed problem on the network, we ran the
thing again to check it.
Regards,
Alastair.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lawrence Lustig" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "RBG7-L Mailing List" <rbg7-l@rbase.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 16, 2005 4:34 PM
Subject: [RBG7-L] - Re: Small Network


> If you correct the scratch file issue (I learned about the scratch file
> about 2 weeks ago here on the forum) and you still have issues, here a 
> a
> few things I would try:

You can also test the speed of your network by copying a large file from
the
network to a local hard disk and then back to the network and timing it 
in
each
direction.  A reasonable network should be moving 3 to 8 megabytes of 
data
per
second.
At one client where they thought they were having database problems, I
wrote a
little VB script to do this and stuck it on the network.  Then, when
someone
had an issue, they could run the VB script and get a message saying
"Measured
throughput X on download and Y on upload.  Should be at least 2.0 MB/s."
I
found that values ranged from 8 MB/s to .01 MB/s (that is, about 10
kilobytes
per second).  The fastest machine was 800 times faster than the slowest!
Using
that, they were able to locate bad wiring and switches (but by that point
it
was out of my hands).
The point here is to make sure you have a reasonable network throughput
without
involving the database at all.  Once you have the network working
properly, you
can deal with any additional issues at the database level.  But without a
properly configured and funtioning network, you will never get good
performance
from R:Base.  Make sure there are no slow stations at all -- since one
slow
station doing an UPDATE could lock a table for minutes, slowing everyone
else
down.
--
Larry