re Hardware Requirements for running AREV 3.12 application (AREV Specific)
At 17 SEP 1998 11:36:09AM Pierre M. Camilleri wrote:
I've been told that we need powerful hardware in order to run our current Payroll system which was developed under AREV 3.12 (DOS interface). The workstations are Pentiums 90 and have 16Mb RAM installed. Total number of users using the application is around 4. We are running the application under Novell 3.12 without the NLM installed. I find this very hard to believe. We were also told that in order to install the personnel management add-on which runs under Windows 3.11 we would have to upgrade our workstations to say Pentium II 400!
What can any of you say with regards to minimum hardware requirements.
Don't you you think that our Payroll system should run on our current workstations?
At 17 SEP 1998 01:21PM Aaron Kaplan wrote:
ARev won't use more than 4M EMS on the workstation, so it doesn't matter how much RAM you have. Processing speed is speed, so sure, the workstation will process faster with a P2, but you're still processing faster than network trafic most likely.
Don't know what they have that's making you run under win 3.1. Perhaps some more info might explain things.
akaplan@sprezzatura.com
At 17 SEP 1998 05:34PM Victor Engel wrote:
More relevant than the statistics you gave is the size and complexity of the database. Here at Dell until recently, we were processing HR records for over 15,000 employees on a 486 server. We recently upgraded to a very fast Pentium an Netware 4.11 and realized about a 50% performance gain. I think you'll find that the performance bottlenecks will be disk/network related rather than CPU-related once you get up to a Pentium. Unless your application is mostly a RAM-based application, which I bet it isn't if it's a payroll application.
At 18 SEP 1998 08:09AM Pierre M. Camilleri wrote:
Many thanks for your replies!
Our Payroll application only handles around 200 employees. The application which was developed using AREV 3.12 was installed on a Pentium 133, RAID5 and 256Mb RAM server running Novell 3.12 and Windows 3.11. However the NLM pack was not installed.
Lately we had complaints from userssaying that their Payroll application would often crash when running reports, etc forcing them to re-boot their workstations. Their workstations are Pentium 90s with 16Mb RAM. They run the Payroll application in a DOS session under Windows 3.11
Sometime ago I had created and configured a PIF file because they were incorrectly running the application via a batch file. Things improved a little but the application still crashes at times.
Would upgrading to more powerful machines solve these problems?
Would the installation of the NLM improve things? I'm curious to know whether you experienced such problems. I think the problem lies with the application and perhaps Windows 3.11
At 18 SEP 1998 10:54AM Paul Gibbs wrote:
We run a very large maintenance management system on AREV 2.12. We have a hundred plus users accessing this system at any time. To give you some idea of the size of this system, it handles Maintenance, Inventory, Purchasing, Invoice processing and Timekeeping for a large oil refinery. We create 40,000 work orders per year, (some of these sometimes max out at the 64K limit) there are 50,000 equipment master records 60,000 master inventory records, we have files for labor cost history in excess of 1 million records. Recently we upgraded our workstations from 486/66 and P90 with windows 3.1 to Pentium 233 and Windows 95 and NT 4.0. With the upgrade we installed the NLM on our server which is a Compaq proliant Pentium 90 with 256Mb running Netware 3.12. The 486 and P90 workstations worked reasonably well but tended to slow down with the growth of the database. We had problems with workstations locking our whole system and the occasional GFE with windows 3.1. I would recommend insalling the NLM you will see a sig
nificant increase in performance and stability, but your workstations should probably run just fine. Hope this is of help to you
At 18 SEP 1998 10:55AM Paul Gibbs wrote:
We run a very large maintenance management system on AREV 2.12. We have a hundred plus users accessing this system at any time. To give you some idea of the size of this system, it handles Maintenance, Inventory, Purchasing, Invoice processing and Timekeeping for a large oil refinery. We create 40,000 work orders per year, (some of these sometimes max out at the 64K limit) there are 50,000 equipment master records 60,000 master inventory records, we have files for labor cost history in excess of 1 million records. Recently we upgraded our workstations from 486/66 and P90 with windows 3.1 to Pentium 233 and Windows 95 and NT 4.0. With the upgrade we installed the NLM on our server which is a Compaq proliant Pentium 90 with 256Mb running Netware 3.12. The 486 and P90 workstations worked reasonably well but tended to slow down with the growth of the database. We had problems with workstations locking our whole system and the occasional GFE with windows 3.1. I would recommend insalling the NLM you will see a sig
nificant increase in performance and stability, but your workstations should probably run just fine. Hope this is of help to you
At 18 SEP 1998 12:24PM Victor Engel wrote:
The hardware platforms you mentioned are fine. You need to ensure you have correct configurations. The NLM will certainly help. Low amounts of base RAM on the workstation side can also cause some of the problems you are having. After you log in to each workstation, do a WHO from the TCL prompt and check the available RAM. If you have anything below 250,000 you are subject to random problems. Also, make sure you have adequate file handles allocated. You should have 200 divided between local and network files. How you set this up depends on your configuration. I'll leave it to others to give more specifics on that, or you can read the other related threads.