April 16, 2011

Throwing hardware at the problem

My ERP project had been live for a few months, but I never managed to resolve the slowness issue. I'm not very good with SQL Server, and all the optimizations I did probably had limited effects on the performance since Dynamics NAV's C/SIDE code is executed client side and the idiots I have for consultants don't know the difference between native database and SQL Server. I couldn't get to the ERP's code, and even if I could, I probably wouldn't want to hack the code anyway.

Few months ago my boss suddenly told me that we made huge profits this month, and to avoid paying huge amounts of tax on the huge profits, he's giving me special permission to buy stuff. A lot of stuff.

Old server specs (purchased in October 2007): Intel Core 2 Quad Q600 (2.4 GHz), 8 GB DDR2 RAM, ASUS P5K Premium, and 2x500 GB SATA (RAID1). (Was 3x500 GB SATA RAID5, but I listened to the consultants and changed the RAID5 to RAID1, with no difference in speed whatsoever.)

New server specs (purchased in late 2010):


Oh wait...

New server specs: Intel Core i7-950 (3.06 GHz), 24 GB DDR3 RAM, ASUS P6X58D Premium, and 2x160 GB SSD (RAID1).

Windows 7's experience index score is 7.5 on the CPU and RAM, and 7.9 on the hard drive. I wanted to buy a faster CPU, but the 950 is most cost effective, and RAM is maximized for Core i7.

Oh, and the ERP didn't run any faster than before. None whatsoever.

I've talked about my Core 2 Quad Q6600 servers many times before. They were originally bought to replace the older domain controllers and run the ERP database. But I used them for SQL only due to performance recommendations, not that it made any difference since my database is so small. Now that I have the Core i7 dedicated to SQL, I decided to replace domain controllers with the Q6600 servers, and also upgrade the entire domain to 2008 R2 functional level.

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