[p4] Slow Downs - More RAM?

[Robert Cowham]

I know of at least a couple of larger sites running on Windows that have had
performance problems, and indeed stability problems.

Perforce now say the following:

http://www.perforce.com/perforce/technotes/note077.html

Windows Version Limitations

The Windows 32-bit platform (including Windows 2000 and 32 bit versions of
Windows 2003 and XP) has a 2GB per-process memory utilization limit. On
Windows, the Perforce Server runs as a single process, servicing each client
request as a thread within that process. For sites with a very large
transaction volume, this 2GB limitation can inhibit performance and large
operations. The Windows 64-bit platform does not have this memory
limitation. The use of a 64-bit version of Windows is preferable for sites
that might encounter the 2GB per process limitation of the 32-bit version.  


One site cured their issues by a move to Linux, and another site is moving
to Unix but has not yet fixed on platform. That said, database locks can
always cause backups whatever the platform, so you get approaches like
Google presented at the European conference to avoid those.

Robert

> -----Original Message-----
> From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com 
> [mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of Terry Metler
> Sent: 08 January 2007 02:38
> To: perforce-user at perforce.com
> Subject: [p4] Slow Downs - More RAM?
> 
> 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