With the database enabled, the key factor becomes the number of datasets that 
you're exporting.  By default that's response time and short-term packet loss 
for all devices, plus sent/received bytes/sec for all interfaces.  So if each 
of your devices had 16 interfaces, that would be 2000 * 2 + 2000 * 16 * 2, for 
a total of 68000 datasets.

For architectural reasons, performance degrades heavily with more than 20-40k 
datasets.  We're working to increase this limit, but for now the best 
performance investment is reducing that number.  A couple of hours spent 
narrowing the datasets to just those that you *really* want to report on has a 
greater impact than a million dollars of hardware.

Generally, though, the software is I/O-bound, particularly when using the 
database.  And with a single machine, the bottleneck becomes contention rather 
than bandwidth.  If physical space isn't a concern, it's therefore much more 
effective to get three lower-powered systems, running IM, IMDC and Flows 
separately, than a single high-powered one.  SAS doesn't help nearly as much as 
avoiding having three processes constantly fighting over the position of the 
disk head.

My ideal setup on a budget would be three machines with the cheapest 
consumer-grade Core i7s and 4/8/8 GB of RAM for the IM, IMDC and Flows 
machines, respectively.  If I was still under-budget, I'd get an SSD for the IM 
machine and SATA RAID0 for the IMDC & Flows machines, with some money set aside 
to cover the fact that SSDs and consumer SATA drives tend to fail a lot faster 
than server-grade SAS.

But I'd sacrifice just about anything if the money could instead be spent on 
having someone figure out exactly which datasets to export.

David

-----------
David Schnur
Dartware, LLC


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http://forums.intermapper.com/viewtopic.php?p=4077#4077





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