I have an existing customer running D3 on an IBM P Series with AIX.

Currently we have over 250 users on the box, but now the customer
potentially has massive growth plans. I would like to be able to advise
them of other MV sites running large numbers of users, as a confidence
boost.

I am not only interested in D3 but other versions too, for example I
believe that Travis Perkins in the UK are running thousands of users on
Universe.

I would appreciate any information that the group can provide along the
lines of

Customer (if this is not sensitive information)
Platform (e.g. D3)
No. users
Hardware

Thanks in advance

Stuart

Stuart, I've benchmarked a D3 system with over 10,000 simulated
concurrent users on an IBM S80 and it ran fine, with some excellent
numbers too. I know of real sites that are running well over the
number of users that your client has.

If the site is going to grow a lot, I highly suggest taking advantage
of newer technologies which allow non-persistent usage, near-line data
access, off-line reporting, session pooling, and other mechanisms to
help get the most out of the existing hardware and software.

Feel free to contact me so we can discuss the topology and possible
solutions.

Tony
TG@ removethisNebula-RnD.com

"stuey" wrote:

There are also many sites out there that may not necessarily have
hundreds of sessions but which are running a lot of stuff - one example
is the aer lingus web site - all the flight validation and pricing is
done on unidata and has been specced at sub second response times, and
thousands of requests per minute. There are actually quite a few
airline, hotel and travel sites out there with a unidata system in the
background (courtesy of datalex).

Here is a post from the u2ug list that addresses this; I have seen it
elsewhere as well. The bottom line is that max users/scalability is
really not an issue for mv systems.

/Scott Ballinger
Pareto Corporation
Edmonds WA USA
206 713 6006


Stephen O'Neal <xxx@us,ibm.com> wrote on 21 November 2005

This last weekend, we attained a new high number of users on a U2
database
of 15,200 on a single system running an application!

Tim Snyder, Principle Consultant of the U2 Lab Services group,
performed
this formal benchmark at one of the IBM benchmark centers on an
IBM p590
+ 64 dual core CPUs for a total of 128 processors
+ 124gb memory (no, that's not a typo - that's all the benchmark center
had available - odd number though)
+ 34 disk drives, striped with JFS2 on two FAStT controllers

It required an IBM p570 divided into 4 LPARs (logical partitions) to
push
the load which simulated 30 different processes. It took 6 weeks of
preparation before the 3 weeks to set up the simulation at the
benchmark
facility.

The application was from Pacific Decision Sciences Corporation
(www.pdsc.com).

The database had over 1 billion records in it.

We thought this was pretty cool. And yes, people are dancing in Denver!
Steve

Stephen M. O'Neal, CDP & IBM U2 Certified
Services Sales Specialist
North America U2 Lab Services
Information Management, IBM Software Group

Thanks for the info so far guys, its much appreciated.

However, I'm sure that my customer will gain much more confidence from
hearing of live sites with thousands of users rather than benchmarks of
that size. I just need to be able to quote real world examples.

Again thanks in advance for any information.

Stuart

I never met a benchmark that I didn't like.
BobJ
"stuey" <swhiley (AT) zisk (DOT) com> wrote

At Hill House Hammond we had upwards of 7,000 users on D3 - but that
was on a distributed network of upwards of 250 servers. The largest
number we had on a single server was on one of the 9 nodes on the IBM
SP - the one running the Call Centre operation, and that was only
around 250 max users I think. One of the boys from the TIGERS team
would be better able to recall the actual figures - if they still lurk
here. I don't recall the maximum number of users we had on the
application-server at any one time running the online quotes web site
(running D3 and FlashCONNECT), but it could have been many, many
thousands and it'd have run quite happily - as the application server
simply used an active port to service a web request and, having dealt
with it and saved the "state", promptly forgot about it until the
"browser instance" either timed out or sent in another post from the
browser. Servicing a web request never took more than a fraction of a
second. I know that is of no use whatsoever, but it's all I have.

Mike.

stuey wrote:

Stuart,

Reality has many clients which are running many thousands of users, some of
these are on single machines others across multiple machines.
Our largest site currently runs the entire Health service for one of the
largest states in Australia. Others included UK Police forces, and some
very large corporate customers including one which pushes upto 24 million
updates through per day, per machine and they have eight machines!

When you talking about large numbers of users then you also have to bear in
mind the resilience capabilities of any database, Reality again very highly
here. As Tony also points out you also need to look at the newer
technologies of the databases to make use of non persistence connections
etc.

If you want to talk to any of these sites or want names then I'm happy to
discuss off group. Email me at mark dot fuller at Northgate hyphen IS dot
COM

Regards
Mark
"stuey" <swhiley (AT) zisk (DOT) com> wrote

For confidentiality reasons I will not post company names but here in
Australia I know of a few;

Platform : Universe 10
No. Users : 800 + 900
Hardware : Alpha dual 1GHz with 4 GB memory and big SAN

Platform : Universe 10
No. Users : 300
Hardware : IBM AIX (dual somethings only a baby) and medium SAN

Platform : D3
No. Users : 300
Hardware : Some Dell thing and a medium SAN

Platform : Universe 10
No. Users : few 1000's
Hardware : Unknown

The list goes on and on, 250 not that big, with all database
applications its not really the CPU or Memory that is the bottleneck
but Disk I/O, there fore a good SAN or disk array is required,
personally I always prefer a SAN as you get better bang for buck than
any other hardware upgrade. Also if the server is dedicated to just D3
the network traffic should be pretty minimal if you are only using text
based applications. Other services like web and mail usually bring the
server performance down, whether it be Windows or Unix/Linux and
printing if you have masses of printers can be an issue, its best to
dedicate other servers to these services.

2c worth.

D3 Linux
1500 Users
Dell POweredge 1750 + SAN


"stuey" <swhiley (AT) zisk (DOT) com> wrote