Kyle Parrish ([log in to unmask]) wrote:
: Birket,
 
: I don't have an application yet!  :-)  Though, yes, I would hope to be able
: to utilize ODBC rather than RPC or other internals I don't know anything
: about.
 
: Here is my plan.  A professor links to my Web site.  Uses a login screen
: to get access to another screen.  This screen allows him/her to run
: reports, with the data coming back to his/her screen.
 
: Now, here are the three possible ways I see to do this, but I don't
: understand what each would require, so I am putting it out here for input.
:    1)  PC based Web server.  Could I use Powerbuilder, or some other
: ODBC compliant application to perform my calls to Image?
:    2)  UNIX based Web server.  Can I still use ODBC compliant apps to
: make my calls to Image?
:    3)  3000 based Web server.  I got some info that I am digesting now,
: but I need to know what the performance load is on the 3000.
 
Well, since no-one has commented yet on the load performance on the 3000,
I thought I should at least reply with *something*.
 
While I haven't done extremely scientific benchmarking on the HP3000
server, I did do some simple tests making lots of simultaneous
requests to a 3k web server and measuring the time for it to process
them, and comparing it to the 9k doing similar tasks.  I expected
the 3k to have a serious performance hit due to the costly fork().
However, the impact wasn't too bad.  When making 100 sequential calls
to a WWW server, the 3k was just as fast as the 9k, and the 9k I was
testing on was a faster machine!  I never got a chance to finish
studying the bencmarks, so maybe all of this is meaningless :-)
 
The second comment I would make is that if you are worried about overloading
a machine with these types of database requests, you might be using
the wrong interface.  WWW was not designed or optimized for this type of
traffic.  While WWW does provide a nice, OPEN interface, it is not
really the best interface for database queries.  In my opinion, WWW
database front-ends should be primarily used when data is needed for
anonymous, public access.  Otherwise, if you have heavy traffic into
a database, you probably ought to be using the client-servers and odbc
available with most all databases today rather than WWW. That should
give you the best performance.  Hope that makes sense.
 
Good luck,
 
Mike
 
---
Mike Belshe
[log in to unmask]
HP CSY Networking Lab