[p4] Slow Downs - More RAM?

[Terry Metler]

I need opinions about hardware and how "big" I need to go...

 

We've been running Perforce now for about 7 months.  Up to November
everything was running very smoothly but since then we have many slow
downs a day.  There are no indications on the system except that I have
noticed just before everything goes back to normal that the cores all
peg to 100% utilization for a few seconds.  This has slowly gotten worse
to now it is happening two or three times a day.

 

After talking with Perforce support they indicated that it looks like a
case that the server is running out of resources.  There are points when
there are over 700 concurrent transactions.  Support mentioned that it
looks like a large process is backing everything up and eventually it
does finish and everything else runs really fast that was backed up
behind that one process.  

 

I've rebuilt the databases, defragged the drives, removed the audit file
and moved the database files to a separate drive to try and get some
additional performance.  None of these have made a significant
improvement.

 

Currently...

Users: 160

Files: 460 000 (not including all revisions)

Server

            CPU: 2 x 3.0Ghz Xeon

            RAM: 4GB

            OS: Windows Server 2003 Standard

 

New server I'm looking at...

CPU: 2 x 2.6Ghz Opteron

RAM: 32GB (Can be upgraded to 64GB)

OS: Windows Server 2003 Enterprise

 

I am hoping to hear from some people that have been using Perforce for a
lot longer than we have.  I don't want to purchase a bigger server and
not get the performance I'm being told I would get with "a lot more" RAM
(the current one is almost maxed out physically and is maxed with the
Standard OS).  All recommendations are more than welcomed as I want to
have a better feeling that it is the hardware that is causing the slow
downs before shelling out for a new server.

 

Thanks in advance for your recommendations and feedback!!

 

 

Terry



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