Com+ versus VB application

[BrianNI]

Hi all,

I have recently installed a new version of a factory floor system which was an upgrade from DOS to Win2000 / SQL / Com+. The system basically collects registrations from the factory floor and inserts them into a SQL database after processing them through the business logic. After the install we noticed that the processing performance was very poor. We then got the supplier to extract the code and simply build a VB application and test this for speed. The results from this showed that by using the same code that we got a 400% increase in performance.

What I want to know is speed performance an unfortunate overhead of Com+ or is it simply bad programming. I have had a peek at the code and fear it is the latter. If anyone could direct me to a good site or book for a non programmer so that I can get my head around the benifits of Com+, drawbacks and obvious ways of how not to code, it would give me a better position to talk to this supplier.

Regards

Brian Murphy

 

[Polu]

Hello Brian.

If you are using only one server rather than a farm and this circumstance won't change in future, COM+ is a bad decission, but if you need failure tolerance or high availability, COM+ could help.

COM+ is used in distributed architectures: if your system involves 10 or 20 thin client machines and 3 or 4 servers and a web based solution has been discarded, use of COM+/DCOM is a must if working in Microsoft environment.

Regards.

Polu.

 

[mikewoodhouse]

What I want to know is speed performance an unfortunate overhead of Com+ or is it simply bad programming. I have had a peek at the code and fear it is the latter

There is an order-of-magnitude response time drop when moving from a class in process to one that's out of process and another when the out of process object moves off the host machine (i.e. when you go to DCOM/COM+). So there are design issues that need to be addressed, namely minimising the number of 'round trips' between application and library. If there are a large number of property Let/Get accesses between the COM+ class and the app, then that's a good place to start optimising: look to set up as much as possible on the client side before going out over the network. Options include setting lots of properties in one call or creating a parameter object to hold the values and passing that.

HTH,

Mike