SIMS Server large sites 10Gb databases or larger, what server CPU are you running?

[psydii]

Just looking to benchmark somewhat.

 

For sites with more than 1500 students/10+GB databases, how many cores and what speed cpu are you running on your SQL server? How did you make that decision? Is your SIMS system fast enough?

 

Also how often do you re-index? What activities drive fragmentation such that a re-index makes a difference?

 

Thanks

P.

[PD1279]

I would worry more about RAM and even more importantly Disks - If you can SSD the database thats where you'll see the speed improvement

[bobsmith]

We've got 1400 students and 6gb for SIMS and another 4Gb for Discover - running on 17gb of RAM and 3 cores from a Xeon E5-2640 @ 2.5Ghz

 

Performance is barely adequate - some long hangs when writing to the DB.

 

This is all running off an ageing SAN using mechanical disks.

 

SSDs in RAID?

[Mako]

I virtualised our SIMS server over summer and assigned it 8 cores and 32GB RAM on an SSD host. CPU ticks over at anywhere between 0 and 15%, spikes up to 50-60% briefly during busy moments. RAM idles at 15GB and doesn't fluctuate much.

 

When there were no students in, our Exams and Reporting officers were hailing how much better it was. However I've been getting it in the neck in the last couple of weeks about how slow SIMS is, and how it is crashing every so often on client desktops.

 

Logged a call with SchoolsICT to see if there's some magic they can work (such as releasing a patch?) in terms of boosting performance. I don't think there's much more I could throw at it hardware wise to improve it so it must be something in the setup or SQL, but I'm not an expert in SQL.

[PD1279]

Hi, OK that processor normally has 6 cores - but thats by the by.

 

SSDs in RAID are fine as long as you know what you are doing and that you use Enterpise SSDs like Intels or Samsung Pro (or better). If you have the budget then you would set up RAID 10 then you get the write performance of RAID 0 and the redundancy of RAID 1. I personnally would use DAS for an SQL DB anyway as last thing I want if the network goes down my main DB going awol.

 

You could still use the SAN for onsite backups so you would not discard it and recovery would be better than bringing back from offsite/cloud too.

 

Virtualising SQL is a topical subject but as long as the Data is on it's own set of SSDs - not shared with any other system, then it should be fine

Edited October 9, 2018 by PD1279

[psydii]

For those who are using virtualization, another few questions: What is the total vcpu count of all the VMs on the box that is running SIMS vs how many real cores are there on the box? How many cores have you got for SIMS? What speed are those cores running at?

 

FWIW if you have enough fast spindles and bandwidth you don't need SSD. Also having enough RAM to contain the entire database + 50% seems to really reduce the load on the disks. But what I am really after is whether anyone with adequate performance has a CPU with a lower clock speed than Capita recommend.

[bobsmith]

Capita haven't really moved their minimum spec in ages, so I'd not rely too heavily on their guidance.

 

In response to @PD1279 it's a VM which explains the core count. The other thing I know is that our drives are shared with some other quite intensive loads our CPU load can get quite high and RAM usage is frequently 15Gb or more.

[matt40k]

@psydii I wouldn't worry about CPU speeds too much, so long as its a modern CPU you'll be fine.

 

If you're using SQL standard, local SSD and have half decide CPU and RAM and you're still having performance problems it normally means you need to do a bit of maintenance, once upon a time there was a really good document on SupportNet that detailed how to setup a SQL Agent job that rebuilds the indexes, stats, and runs the SIMS specific things like archive attendance marks etc.