server consolidation; gain in network performance on hpux

[Shivkumar]

Dear Sirs;

We are facing network performance issue in our web applications. We hosts various components like web server, application server (weblogic), signle sign on products, and oracle database in different physical servers.

I am speculating that if we hosts our web applications on vPar or nPar server it might reduce the network latency and provide us better performance because different os instances might be sharing the same fibre optic (or something else) backbone. Each os instances will be separate though but they will be using faster backbone.

Please suggest whether my speculation is right ??

Thanks,
Shiv

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

It's possible but have you established that the network is actually the bottleneck? Are you using Gigabit network connections or something slower. One thing to consider is to put your Oracle traffic between application and database servers on a dedicated network. Without gathering sufficient data, it's very easy to spend lots of money and time for very little (if any) gain in performance. Moreover, there are many, many cases -- especially with databases --- where better coding can exceed all of your hardware and network tuning by a factor of 10. Find your bottlenecks and attack your problems in the order of the size of the bottleneck.

[Yogeeraj_1]

hi,

you may use glance to monitor your inbound and outbound traffics.

On the other hand, you can also monitor your performance at the database level. Running and analysis the statspack report can be of great help.

then you can monitor your traffic at your gigabit switch level - for each port, etc.

You just cannot speculate, you have to gather facts and interprete your observations gathered from realtime events.

good luck
kind regards
yogeeraj

[Mahesh Kumar Malik]

Hi Shiv

1. To improve Network performance, first of all you must have Gigabit Backbone with all network switches with maximum backbone IO bandwidth / throughput.

2. There should be dual NIC per server and they can be teamed to double Netowrk Bandwidth

3. Thinking to migrate to vPar or nPar environment may yield little gain in terms of internal processing

4. You may go for Work Load Manager in order to allocate hardware resources in order to get best utilisation of hardware.

5. Finally kernel Tuning , amount of physical RAM, no of processors are also different options to improve application performance

Regards
Mahesh

[Arunvijai_4]

Hi Shiv,

To attain, N/W performance, you can consider the following stuffs.

1) Use of Gigabit cards. Also switching to SAN with Fibre channel will be good.

2) Kernel tuning respective of Networking parameters.

3) Application tuning. (Ex: Tuning Weblogic)

4) Load balancing (Dual NICs)

-Arun

[rick jones]

As far as networking is concerned, vPars/nPars will be no different than separate physical servers when all are connected to the same switches.

As suggested by others, determining that you have a bottleneck induced by networking would be a good thing to do. Lanadmin stats, netstat stats, CPU utilization stats etc etc etc. perhaps even tcpdump and tusc traces. might be a big enough job you may want to bring-in some experts.