Can anyone please tell me anything about the following:

AIX O/S - IBM RS6000 server

I want to know where I can go to check and see how much RAM is intalled in the server, how many Processors are installed in the server, and how I can run a sar command to show me processor statistics?

I am having a situation where we have an report application - COGNOS/Impromptu - similar to Crystal Seagate Reports - that is loaded on PC's. Our in house network operates at 10mbs and we are on hubs. When we perform a query in our report software, it makes a connection to our database (ODBC) and it seems to bring our server to it's knees.

I am wondering if installing a switch, upgrading to 100mbs network, and possibly adding a processor and additional memory will help speed things up.

Can anyone help ?

Are you the administrator of the system?


If so, then you can find information at the following:

Commands: Unixguide.net
Support - Documentation:
IBM Support Page
Redbooks

If you are not the admin, then get with that person. They should know if something is wrong or have the history on the server to show that it needs more cpu/memory/disks.

FYI - I doubt that you need to change the network - when you run a query the request goes to the server. The server finds the information (this is where you state it is dying) and then sends it back. Unless you see big delays on the network (ask your network folks if you have some) it normally is not that.

you can run the lsdev -C command and grep for processor or memory.
if you run the standard sar command : sar 5 10
this will produce a 5 second snap shot of the system, ten times.
The idle column will tell you if your processor(s) are being thrashed or not

smit memory should show you the amount of memory installed on the server
Another area to look at will be the paging space
Goto the main smit menu and you should be able to find the paging area.
normallly setup twice the actual size of real memory.

Mark

Being that I've worked with Seagate Info (the automation of reporting for Crystal Reports), I can say that it should not crush the "entire" server.

You may want to rework the query - it's taking too long not because the server can't handle it, but because the SQL query is slow or not using the proper indexes.

Also, if you have 100 distributions of each report, rather than running the same query for each report, you can run a query out to disk, then run the report against the disk file... Works much better.

I'm not familiar with the exact product that you're using, but there could be many generic reasons, such as the above, that could cause this.

Also, are the reports being run on the Unix box, or does that just house the database?

Here is the first question that I would ask. Does the COGNOS app crunch the data on the client machine or on the server? If the numbers are crunched on the client side then yeah, the 10 Mbit/Sec network doesn't help very much.

I ran a FileMagic database that processed data on the client side and it wasn't a pretty sight. Corrupted a bunch of indexes with that product (they have a client/server product that is much nicer, just to be fair).

The second question would be how much data are you trying to push down the pipe?

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