Al,  the 948's are end-of-support this year.  Support for MPEix 6.5 will
not be there for that box.  While it was a good box in its time, it is a
slow box compared to most of the newer small machines.
Since it sounds like this will be a critical step in your business
process, you should consider an upgrade to a supported box as one of the
first steps.  A 939KS is approximately the same size as the 948 but
considerably faster.

First question to answer,  how many web transactions are you expecting.
One, two an hour,  don't worry about the performance hit, one or two a
minute.... hmmm, several hundred an hour, start to worry.

Second question, how are you getting the data from the commerce server
to the 948,  LAN,  RS232,  middleware?

Third question,  are you writing the code yourself, or using a third
party package to connect the machines?  If so what does that vendor
suggest?

Fourth question,  how busy are the machines now?  10% busy average, 20%
at peaks?  What is the I/O activity for the disk drives on this
machine?  Is the machine maxed out with memory or is it starved and
swapping objects to disk?

As for the load, I presume that the commerce server link is basically
automating a manual order entry process.  What type of impact would you
see to the system as it is now if you take your current workload and
just manually enter the web transactions.  Does it double your current
number of transactions?

Are you happy with the current performance of the 948?  If not, then
you'd probably be unhappy if you add any additonal work on the machine.

Al wrote:
>
> We got a couple of 948s running our inventory management and order
> processing system. We intend to link a commerce server to one of the 948s,
> capture orders vi the web and pass them on to the 3000 for stock allocation.
> What we are not sure of is what load we would be putting on the system or
> what is the current load on the 3000s. Can someone share their experience in
> similar situations and tell me how we can measure the current load /
> performance of the machines with the objectives of determining whether the
> machines with their current load are capable of taking on extra processing
> load as a result of integration with an E-commerce server.
>
> Thanks
> Al