I set up a test case in which I populate 15,000 rows in a table using isql and monitoring Sybase performance on SUN and LINUX boxes. I get an average performance of about 40 inserts per second on a low end 360 MHz Sun machine and an average performance of about 13 inserts per second on a 2.8 GHz LINUX box…
I have read and implemented the LINUX specific changes in Sybase ASE on Linux FAQ Michael Peppler ( and Sybase white papers for LINUX. The only benefit I got was when I changed the file system from the default reiser to ext3 which raised the performance on LINUX to 25 trades per second. I increased the max memory, increased the shared memory in /etc/sysctl.conf, changed the recovery interval – nothing seems to work. I’m sure I can achieve better results than this.
My questions are:
1. Is it possible to create raw devices on LINUX 2.4.21-241 kernel? If yes, how? Does it help in increasing performance?
2. I see that on Sun there is only one instance of the data server executable running whereas on LINUX there are four running? i.e. ps –aef | grep dataserver on Linux returns 4 rows? Why?
3. I increase the shared memory. On attempting to populate the 15000 rows, free gives me value of shared as ZERO? Isn’t this strange?
4. My page size on Linux is 4096 and that on Solaris is 8192? Does this make a difference?
5. Are there any known problems with Sybase ASE 12.5.2 / EBF 12061 on LINUX kernel 2.4.21-241?
Best regards,
Ali Reza
I have read and implemented the LINUX specific changes in Sybase ASE on Linux FAQ Michael Peppler ( and Sybase white papers for LINUX. The only benefit I got was when I changed the file system from the default reiser to ext3 which raised the performance on LINUX to 25 trades per second. I increased the max memory, increased the shared memory in /etc/sysctl.conf, changed the recovery interval – nothing seems to work. I’m sure I can achieve better results than this.
My questions are:
1. Is it possible to create raw devices on LINUX 2.4.21-241 kernel? If yes, how? Does it help in increasing performance?
2. I see that on Sun there is only one instance of the data server executable running whereas on LINUX there are four running? i.e. ps –aef | grep dataserver on Linux returns 4 rows? Why?
3. I increase the shared memory. On attempting to populate the 15000 rows, free gives me value of shared as ZERO? Isn’t this strange?
4. My page size on Linux is 4096 and that on Solaris is 8192? Does this make a difference?
5. Are there any known problems with Sybase ASE 12.5.2 / EBF 12061 on LINUX kernel 2.4.21-241?
Best regards,
Ali Reza