Method Server to User Ratio

[DougPurtill]

What is a good method server to CAD user ratio? Right now I have 5 heavy users, soon to be 7, and 2 light users all on 2 method servers and 1 background method server. The Windchill check in, check out, and save & upload times are terrible. 7 to 10 minutes or more terrible! Everything runs okay with 2 heavy users on but when you add the 3rd, 4th and 5th you can actually see the impact of each additional heavy user. Do to the type of work that we do here, each of our heavy users are checking in and out several times an hour. Windchill 8.0 040 Dell PowerEdge 2950 Dual QUAD core XEON 2.00GHZ CPUs (Quad Core Xeon Processor E53352x4MB Cache, 2.0GHz, 1333MHz FSB) Note: CPUs mostly running idle. 4GB of RAM (4GB 533MHz (4x1GB), Dual Ranked DIMMs Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition: will have to upgrade to increase RAM Should I upgrade the O.S. and add more RAM and create 1 method server for each heavy CAD user? Could there be another issue here? Any thoughts? I don't want to just throw more RAM at the problem. I want to know the real cause and solution. Doug P.

[RussDavidson]

I don't have experience with 8.0, but database access can be another bottleneck that you need to investigate too. What do you have for a hard drive setup? From my experience, you want to get the database on as fast and isolated (separate spindle(s)) of a hard drive as possible so the data can get in and out as fast as possible. Since your CPU's are mostly idle, I'd check the hard drive activity first. Assuming that you are running Oracle, do you have it optimized too? I'm no Oracle expert either, but tuning can have a big impact on user operations. I'm running 9.1 with three method servers and one background with around 10-12 users actively hitting the server, and we don't usually see long wait times. Once in awhile, but not usually.

[LawrenceGuerra]

I am running Windchill 9.0 on a Dell PE 2900. 3.0 GHz quad core Xeon Win 2003 R2 64 bit 15K SAS drives in 2 different RAIDS 16Gb of RAM This system runs very well. I started with 8Gb of RAM, and even though it wasn't paging the system was slow collecting data when adding to workspace. Adding the additional 8Gb made a huge difference. It is also important to keep Oracle tuned. I run sql scripts once a week that update the tables (I don't know much about Oracle) and that made a difference over time.