Re: We quadrupled hardware power and reduced performance

From: Randolph Neall (randolphneall_at_veracitycomputing.com)
Date: 03/17/04 

Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 23:27:30 -0500

Thanks for responding, Greg.

Seems to be CPU where the bottleneck is, oddly enough.

I'm wondering if the Seagate 120 GB disks are really too big to perform
well, and if that could affect CPU usage.

What's weird is that we changed nothing from the old box. It was really an
apples-to-apples test. The only thing that changed was the box, the OS, and
the flavor of SqlServer (moved from Professional to Enterprise). So it's not
a query issue, unless queries like weak boxes better than strong ones.

Thanks,

Randy Neall

"Greg Linwood" <g_linwoodQhotmail.com> wrote in message
news:u#E2nA9CEHA.2600@TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
> Hi Randolph
>
> You should be able to realise the greater performance capabilities of the
> new hardware but you might have to do some work to identify what the
> bottleneck actually is first.
>
> The best way to do this is to implement a normal performance tuning
> methodology - use the available tools such as SQL Profiler, SQL Index
> Wizard, Windows System / Performance Monitor to collect basic data such as
> CPU, Memory, Disk i/o, Index information, long running queries etc. Then
try
> & make meaningful observations of the data acquired & try to identify the
> bottleneck, which may be CPU, Memory, Disk, but given you're on newer &
> bigger hardwared, I'd suggest you'll more likely find database level
issues
> such as indexes, statistics, parallelism etc.
>
> Can you give us any indication as to where the new box is resource
starved?
>
> HTH
>
> Regards,
> Greg Linwood
> SQL Server MVP
>
> "Randolph Neall" <randolphneall@veracitycomputing.com> wrote in message
> news:%23gk6%23z8CEHA.1544@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
> > We have been running a .Net and SQL Server app on an old four-year-old
500
> > mhz HP server with 512 MB RAM and 20 GB harddisk, Windows 2000 Server.
> Today
> > we moved it to a new 2.16 gigahertz box with 1 GB RAM and 120 GB
harddisk,
> > Windows 2003 Server. We thought we'd see a dramatic improvement in
> > performance. Instead it is worse than on the old computer.
> >
> > The new computer has two hardware mirrored drives, as I said, 120 GB
> apiece,
> > with no partition, just the C drive. We were doing only reads, not
writes.
> > Not sure where the bottleneck is. The new box is running at roughly 80 -
> > 100% CPU capacity, which also came as somewhat of a surprise. Thought it
> > would drop dramatically below the old box or at least, if that high, get
> > through the process faster. But it was not to be.
> >
> > The processor on the old box was Intel, the new, AMD. Not sure if that
> makes
> > a difference.
> >
> > We did several tests with new box serving as server to other boxes. Then
> we
> > did all the action on the server itself, where it was both client and
> > server. That did not seem to help much either, so things cannot be
blamed
> on
> > the speed of our network.
> >
> > We are dumbfounded, wondering whether something is wrong with our new
box,
> > or if the large drives, not striped, would it the problem, or what...
> >
> > We are running MSSql Enterprise, using the default installation
settings.
> >
> > Any ideas would be appreciated.
> >
> > Randy Neall
> >
> >
>
>

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