Compaq ProLiant 1000 Configuration and Tuning of Sybase System 11 for Microsof - Page 11

Page 8 Configuration and Tuning of Sybase System 11 for Microsoft Windows NT on Compaq Servers YNon-bootable partitions to be formatted with FAT file system are limited to 4GB. Nonbootable partitions to be formatted with NTFS file system are typically limited by the physical space. Network Planning The objective of the Network Planning section is to provide information on how the network can influence performance of Sybase SQL Server. This section is somewhat incomplete at this time, and as we continue investigating various areas of performance, optimization and interpretability, additional information will be released when it becomes available. The information in this section is being provided to give the reader a heads up to evaluate alternative implementations. Results presented below are with Windows NT workstations and a Windows NT server, and may not be indicative of other workstation/server combinations. Network Characteristics of a Sybase SQL Server Environment On-line transaction processing (OLTP) environments typically generate a large number of small packets, and the amount of data being transmitted between the clients and the server is relatively small. On the other hand decision support systems (DSS) environments typically generate a large number of large packets, and the amount of data being transmitted between the clients and the server is relatively large. Many applications heavily utilize stored procedures, which not only decrease processing at the server, but also reduce network traffic. Stored procedures are invoked by passing the name of the stored procedure along with its parameters to the server. Even though stored procedures can return any amount of data, a typical stored procedure returns only a very small result set. However, using stored procedures or not, the bulk of OLTP and DSS processing still occurs at the server, with the physical network layer (network interface controller or cables) seldom having a significant influence on the overall performance. From the hardware perspective, you should have a 16- or 32-bit bus-master network card installed in the server to minimize the processing overhead associated with non-bus master network cards. Check to insure that the Sybase SQL Server system is not the server responsible for being the Default Gateway, Primary WINS Server, Secondary WINS Server, or Domain Name Service Server (DNS). Having these services enabled on the Sybase SQL Server system will impact the overall performance of the server and increase the amount of network traffic to this server. When possible, move these services to another Windows NT server on the network. Refer to the Sybase SQL Server, Installation Guide for Microsoft Windows NT for information on how to configure the server and the clients to support a particular network protocol. Network Protocols: Packet Sizes Sybase SQL Server communicates with clients through Tabular Data Stream (TDS). TDS packets have a default size of 512 bytes. Applications can manipulate the packet size using the DB-Library dbsetlpacket() call; with BCP and ISQL utilities you can change the packet size using the [-a packetsize] parameter. The TDS packet size also needs to be incremented at the Sybase SQL Server for the clients to connect properly to the server. From sp_configure alter the setting for maximum network packet size to match or exceed the maximum application packet size. Utilizing larger TDS packet sizes also requires that you increase the memory requirements for the Sybase SQL Server kernel. The sp_configure value for additional netmem controls the size of this kernel memory allocation and will need to be increased. Please refer to the Sybase SQL Server, Systems Administration Guide for more guidelines on computing the amount of additional netmem required. © 1996 Compaq Computer Corporation, All Rights Reserved Doc No 143A/0596