Re: code optimization was: Trivia: Processor MHz

From: "James W. Kilgore" <eMail@James-W-Kilgore.com>
> My wife is a PC, Peachtree - MAS90, consultant.  From
> the stories she tells me a 400mhz NT server croaks with
> 4 users.

This says more about the design of Peachtree than the capacity of Intel and
Windows.  My guess is that the multi-user version of Peachtree is largely
based on the single user version.

Lots of single user applications had a hard time making the transition to a
network.  One common problem was the database these applications used.  The
I/O routines required that the entire data and index files be downloaded to
the workstation for processing.  It translated to huge traffic on the
network, and lots of work on the file server.

ODBC was a great improvement, in comparison.  Instead of downloading the
files to the workstation, the workstation sends a message to the server to
select or update small sets of data.  The scalability goes up dramatically.

I have reasons for developing and promoting OS/400 based solutions.  But
performance is not one of them.  Today's Wintel applications can be designed
to provide exceptional performance and scalability.  Wintel offers much
better price/performance than OS/400.  The TPC benchmarks are a good
example.


Nathan M. Andelin
www.relational-data.com