rpcfod@uarthur.UUCP (Robert Patt-Corner) (10/29/90)
Does anyone have practical information that goes beyond the documentation on tuning LANWorks for Macintosh for File Server tuning. We're using 4th Dimension, which really crawls!
alexis@panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen) (10/31/90)
In article <22@uarthur.UUCP> rpcfod@uarthur.UUCP (Robert Patt-Corner) writes: >Does anyone have practical information that goes beyond the documentation >on tuning LANWorks for Macintosh for File Server tuning. We're using >4th Dimension, which really crawls! Yes. Get another database. Seriously, there's very little you can do about this. The problem is that, whether you think 4D's front-end is wonderful or not, there can be no question that the back end is one of the stupidest pieces of code to ever see the light of day. It's amazing how many times it will hit the same damn sector on disk in just a few seconds. If you're running single-user mode, though, you can help things a lot by running with a _LARGE_ cache. Give it as many megs as you can. In fact, (this is kind of funny) the best thing you can do to 4D is run it under A/UX 2.0 with lots of buffer cache. It can get up to seven times faster! Sadly, it's not compatible with A/UX in a really nasty way: You can only run it once. Then you have to reboot... BTW, I'm assuming that you are in fact limited by the bandwidth on your NIC (or LocalTalk, if you're running that). If in fact your server is really puny, it might conceivably contribute to the slowness. In that case, do all the usual things- add RAM, faster disks, etc. I doubt that software tuning will have a significant effect. (If anyone can prove that to be wrong, I'd love to hear about it...) --- Alexis Rosen Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix {cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis