Monday 20 February 2012

CSE and Separate Database Machines

Over the years a number of CSE sites have tried to place the CSE database and software on separate physical servers. Technically there is no issue with making this function correctly, but what we have seen is that the additional network traffic required slows down the overall performance and response times of the software considerably, the point where it outweighs the benefits of spreading the CPU load. This is especially noticeable for servers that have huge amounts of memory, where large portions of the database are available in cache, and therefore the network response becomes a larger percentage of the overall transaction since disk i/o is less of a bottleneck.

Where customers have utilised this approach, it has been necessary to implement complex and expensive dedicated network pipes between the servers, and frankly is not worth it just to spread the load, where actually a single powerful server is perfectly capable of serving the needs of the entire Gen development team.
We therefore strongly recommend that the database and software reside on the same machine.

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