How much ram?

[faomtl]

I got a new server, running win2003 and FMS 8. Has of today I'm hosting 80 databases with an average of 5 users per database. The most users that I have had at the same time is about 30. I got 2gig of ram. I'm wondering how the system would perform if I had 200+ users logged at the same time. How much ram should I get more for that scenario. Is there a rule that I don't know about (like a terminal server requires 80 megs of ram per users) fo FMS8.

Please don't answer has much ram as you can get!!!

Fred.

[Wim Decorte]

As much RAM as you can get : Really, it's cheap and it will help out. But more importantly for that many users, you need very fast hard disks. And more than one processor. Probably more than one NIC (of the good kind, that you can multi-home to one IP address).

Also your solution needs to be designed for maximum speed. There are no hard and fast rules on how to dimension a machine for a certain solution.

But you can use the OS performance monitor tools to establish a baseline of data for 5, 10, 30,... users. Carefully monitor your system and capture the data: bandwith, packets/second, disk pages per second, FMS cache hits, processor activity,... thw works. With that data you'll be able to project what's going to happen with 200+ users and where you need to spend money on: memory, hard disk, processor, network,... whatever of those that turns out to be the biggest bottlenecks.

All of this takes some time and effort but it will pay off in the long run with a better uptime and faster client performance.

[Steven H. Blackwell]

IIRC, the limit that the OS can handle is 4 GB RAM.

Steven