[p4] Slow Downs - More RAM?

[Tony Sweeney]

Terry Metler wrote:
> 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.

First off, how large are your db.* files?  If they (or a useful working 
set) will comfortably fit in memory, then that isn't the issue, and more 
RAM won't help.

Next,
	have you tried setting server logging to level 2 or 3 and analysing the 
log using P4GLA, a graphical logfile analyser that can be found in the 
public depot?  With this you can identify the long-running processes 
that are holding locks and causing everything else to stall waiting for 
the locks to be released.  If you can identify the source of the 
problem, then you can start trying to tune the server to mitigate the 
problem.  In releases prior to 2006.1, performing large integrations 
using either GUI pretty much guaranteed this behaviour at one site I 
worked at.  The fix for P4Win 2006.1 is described in the release notes 
as follows:

#82234
     If the number of files in a changelist is greater than 500 after an
     integrate, P4Win simply refreshes the Depot and Pending Changelist
     panes rather than attempting to individually add all the files to
     the changelist.  (Job @18168 - Bug)

An equivalent fix seems to have made it into P4V as well.

Tony.

> 
>  
> 
> 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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