Re: Upgrade existing machine or buy new?

[Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>]

James,

With respect to the PHP application, they can realistically expect a 50x performance increase by going with a new system vs. something like a 5% increase by upgrading DISK and RAM.  PHP is a CPU intensive workload.

Nathan.




----- Original Message ----
From: James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: midrange-l <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Mon, February 22, 2010 11:20:12 AM
Subject: Upgrade existing machine or buy new?

Hi everyone,

I have a customer that has a 9406-170 with 256MB main storage and 25.770GB 
disk storage.  This system is fine for the 25 or so concurrent users most 
of the time.  Now we are going to install a web application using Zend. 
When we run our web app on that system, it is too slow.  The customer is 
considering a new System i for this reason.  What would be the best use of 
their money, buy a new System i or upgrade the RAM and add more disk?

They currently are as near as makes no difference to 100% disk usage.  The 
daily close and backup is taking about 40 minutes longer than they would 
like.  They are on v5r3m0.  An important software factor when considering 
v6 and beyond is that they are heavy users of WRKQRY and that isn't going 
to change.

Best suggestions?

James Rich

if you want to understand why that is, there are many good books on
the design of operating systems. please pass them along to redmond
when you're done reading them :)
    - Paul Davis on ardour-dev