Increasing the NT Server Speed?

[raid]

How can I increase the NT4 server speed. We are using this OS for our POS application.<br>
Our application is written in Magic 5.7 DOS version. Any hardware and software optimization will be appreciated.

 

[sufehmi]

How's the client/server process configured? Do you put the application in NT server and then access the application by mapped drive? What's the network bandwidth? What's you disk configuration? How many users? What's the server's configuration? Etc, without all of this information it's rather hard to optimize your server.<br>
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Anyway, try here

http://www.pureperformance.com

for some good tips. And have you visit this?

http://www.ntfaq.com,

so many to learn from there.<br>
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Good luck.<br>

 

[raid]

Thanks for the reply.<br>
Our configuration are as follows:<br>
Server Hardware: Motherboard is Informtech with Intel 440BX Chipsets, 128 Mb RAM, With 2-9Gb Raid 1 in Adaptec AHA133 Raid Card, NIC is DLINK DFE530TX 10/100Mbps, UTP Cabling Cat5, our Hub is Autosense with Switch 10/100 DE916X.<br>
Server OS is NT4.0 with SP4 installed.<br>
Applications in the server is files/data in a mapped drive accesed by applicationbs in local disk of clients.<br>
Clients Hrdwares where Magic 5.7 is installed are as follows:<br>
15 units ASUS P2BN on board Intel 82558 NIC10/100 with Pentium II-350 and 32Mb SDRAM. OS is Win95. <br>
10 units Cyrix 133Mhz on LEO Board with NIC-PCI DFE530TX and OS is Win95 (this access/refreshes the screen much faster than Pentium, why?<br>
Help will be appreciated. Is this a LAN Card issue? I tried today putting the DLINK Card in PII unit and the speed improves.

 

[sufehmi]

Alright... for this kind of application, the easiest way for performance boost is by adding RAM to server for caching. But I see that you already have 128 MB in the server, should be more than enough.<br>
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I see that you have implemented RAID 1. It's very safe, yes, but it have some speed penalty. Although somehow the penalty will be lessened if you put each hard drive in different SCSI channel (I believe your RAID controller have 3 channels). Put on board cache on that RAID controller, and it will be even better.<br>
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What protocol being used in client/server? I suggest ONLY TCP/IP for maximum performance. If that's the case, have you upgrade Win95's TCP/IP stack? If not, try downloading it (Winsock 2) from support.microsoft.com and search for "wsetup*.exe" if I'm not mistaken. <br>
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My opinion, for a DOS workstation your config is overkill. Cyrix 133 is enough for the job (but frankly I have no idea why it'd refresh the screen faster - perhaps it's problem between motherboard - NIC). <br>
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Also, for this kind of uses, really NetWare is a much better choice. It have killer disk access performance, because of good code, and also because its cache-algorithm is very efficient.<br>
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I was involved in this kind of project too, and I just need to add more RAM to the NetWare server to substantially improve disk performance. <br>
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Now I remember, yes I got performance problem too (but resolved it). It was because the distance from server - workstation was too far. Using some NIC will be okay because they can extend the limitation of Ethernet, but some NIC don't have that capability. After I install repeaters & correct connectors installation, all workstations runs very, very quickly.<br>
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Phew... anything related to your case so far?<br>
Let me know.<br>
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[Zelandakh]

Check the speed of your network links as some of the autosense ports with autosensing cards will run at 10Mhz not 100. You also don't mention the processor of the server - make sure that is top flight. Try putting the server cache on its own disk with no tolerance. Get a 10k SCSI disk for the purpose.

 

[raid]

Thanks for all the reply. Rest assured that I'll keep you posted with the developments.