Hi, I was hoping some of you may have experienced the same scenario, and may have some useful advice to share.
We are a small development team (3 developers) working for a small group of users (150). Although our client base is fairly small, we create component based applications using VB (n-tier design).
We have 4 physical machines at our disposal (NT4 Workstations) and we use them for our application servers using dcom (all ActiveX EXEs). We also use these machines to house our databases (FoxPro DBFs).
Basically, when we create our applications (VB / DHTML) we distribute components (DLLs) that communicate with the components located on our 4 serves using DCOM. We do not have tools like MTS or SQL server at our disposal, we have what I mentioned.
Now for the most part, everything works fine. Big problem is, some of the operations done by our activeX servers are quite time consuming, resulting in our system occasionally hanging. I've been told by our NT department that this is probably due to the fact that our PCs can only handle up to 10 concurrent users, and anything more will cause problems.
This is where I'm looking for a little guidance. We would like to keep our current architecture, but fear that in the long run it will hurt all of our applications, reflecting very badly on us. So far, we all seem to be leaning towards eliminating DCOM, and having our DLLs access the databases directly via the network. This also works fine, but doesn't seem to run as quickly. It's also more of a pain when upgrading Data Service related operations.
I would appreciate any alternative solutions if there are any....
Thanks in advance!
Yazster
We are a small development team (3 developers) working for a small group of users (150). Although our client base is fairly small, we create component based applications using VB (n-tier design).
We have 4 physical machines at our disposal (NT4 Workstations) and we use them for our application servers using dcom (all ActiveX EXEs). We also use these machines to house our databases (FoxPro DBFs).
Basically, when we create our applications (VB / DHTML) we distribute components (DLLs) that communicate with the components located on our 4 serves using DCOM. We do not have tools like MTS or SQL server at our disposal, we have what I mentioned.
Now for the most part, everything works fine. Big problem is, some of the operations done by our activeX servers are quite time consuming, resulting in our system occasionally hanging. I've been told by our NT department that this is probably due to the fact that our PCs can only handle up to 10 concurrent users, and anything more will cause problems.
This is where I'm looking for a little guidance. We would like to keep our current architecture, but fear that in the long run it will hurt all of our applications, reflecting very badly on us. So far, we all seem to be leaning towards eliminating DCOM, and having our DLLs access the databases directly via the network. This also works fine, but doesn't seem to run as quickly. It's also more of a pain when upgrading Data Service related operations.
I would appreciate any alternative solutions if there are any....
Thanks in advance!
Yazster
