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 SQL server sizing: looking for pointers and advice

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AskSQLTeam
Ask SQLTeam Question

0 Posts

Posted - 2002-01-22 : 10:07:36
Tai writes "Hi,
I will have to implement a vendor based solution soon. I have
no control over the SQL server components, other than making
sure I buy a big enough server. It has to be a standalone, no
clustering or any other such.

Each of the 100,000 clients will call home to the middle tier
application, and that middle tier will then talk to the SQL
server and make 138 updates and 138 deletes (276 transactions
total). Each client will call home one time a day. This gives
us 1.15 million transactions/hour. Sometimes, a client may make
more than 276 transactions, if there are special circumstances,
but we do not have to take that into consideration at this point.

Vendor notes say anything from 2 Gigs to 10 Gigs of data will
be gathered in a year. The data that is stored will only be
available to a few people, and then, it's only on an adhoc
basis, running canned reports (in other words, the data queries
will only be used infrequently if compared with the gathering
process).

Do you guys have any advice on sizing such a server? I have
used the PowerMatch tool from Dell, but was wondering if there's
anything else out there? As it is a 3rd party vendor app, there
is no way for me to do anything/optimize the app/SQL involved.
All I can do is make sure I spec out a big enough server. Vendor
docs say that a 4xPentium III Xeon + 4 Gigs Ram + lotsa fast HD
will server 60k users. Then they tell us it'll be fine for 100k
users. I want a somewhat independent verification.

Thanx for any help or pointers you can provide. Thanx."

chadmat
The Chadinator

1974 Posts

Posted - 2002-01-22 : 13:32:41
This might help:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnduwon/html/d5cpctyplan.asp


-Chad

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robvolk
Most Valuable Yak

15732 Posts

Posted - 2002-01-22 : 14:11:03
quote:
Each of the 100,000 clients will call home to the middle tier application, and that middle tier will then talk to the SQL server and make 138 updates and 138 deletes (276 transactions total). Each client will call home one time a day. This gives us 1.15 million transactions/hour. Sometimes, a client may make more than 276 transactions, if there are special circumstances, but we do not have to take that into consideration at this point.


I can't say whether the hardware can handle this (not my strong point), but you should definitely reconsider the 138 updates and 138 deletes being done via the middle tier. If all of these transaction MUST occur, and have to occur in a certain order, I don't see why they can't be packaged up into a SQL stored procedure (or several) and performed as one call by the middle tier. Unless there needs to be client interaction between steps, this is much better for performance reasons.

If all of the transactions are done as separate calls from the middle layer, it will create a lot of unnecessary network traffic and possible resource contention/exhaustion. Can you provide more info on what these transactions do, and whether they truly need to managed this way? There's no point in getting monster hardware just to handle excessive CPU cycles if those cycles can be scaled back.

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