das@cup.portal.com (Dale A Scott) (09/27/90)
We are looking into using DEC's ACMS on our VAX. DEC seems to be pushing ACMS very heavily. I am interested in both positive and negative experiences. Your freely expressed feeling, comments, and opinions are appreciated. Dale Scott
a_dent@fennel.cc.uwa.oz.au (10/04/90)
In article <34287@cup.portal.com>, das@cup.portal.com (Dale A Scott) writes: > We are looking into using DEC's ACMS on our VAX. DEC seems to > be pushing ACMS very heavily. I am interested in both positive > and negative experiences. > We are running commercial software written by "Mincom", of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. They have used ACMS as their transaction processing platform on VMS (they also implement on CICS, Primes etc.) Early experiences weren't favourable (we were the first people in Australia to find out that ACMS couldn't handle 10 users!!) but the product has matured somewhat. I know they export a lot to the US so you may be able to chase up some info locally or I could get some opinions from their developers and post (if there's a lot of interest...) When it comes to tuning, it doesn't live well on mixed machines. The nature of ACMS requires you to tune a machine to suit a few, large processes. If you hav users of a financial modelling language (like EPS) they also enjoy some of these benefits, to the detriment of the ACMS system. In general, it certainly lets you support fewer users for a given amount of memory but it pays to experiment with "overfeeding" the server processes lots of Working Set. > Dale Scott Andy Dent A.D. Software phone 09 249 2719 Mac & VAX programmer 94 Bermuda Dve, Ballajura a_dent@fennel.cc.uwa.oz Western Australia 6066 a_dent@fennel.cc.uwa.oz.AU (international)
vaughan@canisius.UUCP (Tom Vaughan) (10/19/90)
Having worked with ACMS for a few months I had the following experience:
o ACMS server configuration forces a *different* style of programming,
since all uses share the same code and its variables. ie. File
pointers may or may not be in the same place as they were when *you*
left a code segment, hence you have to save where you were so you
can resume from where you left off...day during a display of multiple
records in screen fulls.
o We supported 70 plus users on a VAX 8530, with all having a worst
case response time of 5 seconds.
o Integrates well with RMS journaling and TDMS screen management
o makes a mess out of system accounting since users never *logout*,
ACMS takes over the user terminal and terminates the process they
created when they logged in...hence no acconting records.
o ACMS can be tempermental make no mistake, but when working correctly
alot of work can be done by many users on a small platform.
o Performance was maintained by the unusual process priority setup
devised by DEC to meet _promised_ performance. Servers ran at
a base priority of 6, while all others ran at the customary 4.
this scheme kept the programmers and the WPS (yuch) users at bay.
o memory wise it was very economical, without WPS 32 mb would have been
fine.
personal Opinion:
ACMS has its place in the market. It takes getting used to, and surely
requires an active imagination to do unusual things.
I would still rather be doomed to working in Datatrieve.