Network change

[chriskn]

Sage Line 50 currently running on old Windows NT Server - very slowly, not enough memory! Have good spec XP desktops, can I host it on the most powerful in a peer to peer network and switch off my NT server?

[brucedenney]

Yes,

BUT

I would be surprised if the performance of the server is the issue, you might find very little change in performance.

Line50 is a network hungry application, if you have large amounts of data and a slow network then you need to address the network and data issues, not the server.

File Servers do not need to do a huge amount of data processing (Unless they are running MS Exchange, SQL, terminal services etc.) nor do they need huge amounts of memory. This does not stop people selling inappropriately specified dual xeon based powerhouses to do the job that a Celeron could do (because one day you might add Exchange). Indeed I frequently see file servers that rarely experience any processor load.

File servers need to be able to move data from a disk out onto the network faster than the disk or the network. The network is generally the limiting factor unless you are into gigabit.

Most performance issues with line 50 tend to lie in either large amounts of data or problems with networking.

If you do want to host the data on a peer, then I would suggest that the peer that is hosting the data should be the most used one, simply because the performance on that machine will be much better than any other!

[chriskn]

Thanks Bruce. The reason I feel it is the server that's the problem is that it only has 128 Mb of RAM, and the Sage recommendation is for a minimum of 256, and preferably 512. There are only 5 PCs on the network, which is 100Mbs, so isn't gigabit a little overkill?
Kind regards
Chris

[brucedenney]

I think the Sage recommendations are orientated towards the operation of the application rather than the performance of file serving.

Running the application on the server along with something like excel might well use all physical memory and result in paging and degraded performance.

I expect you have already found that the performance when running the application on the slow server is still much faster than running it on a fast workstation.

You could always add more memory to your NT server if you wanted.

I still suggest that the bottleneck is probably the network.

Is Gigabit overkill?

1G network cards are £12 each a small hub is £36

If you know how to change cards have spare slots and good cables for around £100 you could upgrade the network and see some good performance increases.

I would still check that you do have 100M performance as a first step.