Filesystems, Disks and Memory

My product have around 10-15 programs/services running in the sun box, which together completes a task, sequentially. Several instances of the each program/service are running in the unix box, to manage the load and for risk-management reasons. As of now, we dont follow a strict strategy in computing how many instances of each program needs to be invoked to attain a good performance of the whole product.

Is there any strategy to be followed in determining the number of parallel instances of each program...of course, memory consumption, cpu load etc are to be considered for each instance?

Apologize, if this is not the right forum for posting this Q.

It's hard to give a specific reply without knowing the details. But for performance, you need to benchmark it. And remember that you probably won't find one magic number, you just want to be in the right ballpark.

Reliability will require duplicate servers, preferably in different cities. You may be able to dedicate a disk drive (or other resource) to each instance of your program. But then that will dominate your tuning decisions.

Thanks Perderabo!

As you said, "Reliability will require duplicate servers, preferably in different cities", we do have a duplicate sun box geographically located in different cities, which has the same configuration and with the same number of processes running on it.

But the secondary machine is used only when the primary machine goes for a toss.

I am trying to find out the number of parallel instances of each process to be running in each machine, to attain a better reliability.

As u rightly said, we have to benchmark for gaining performance. I happened to hear about the genetic algorithm which can be applied for similar type of scenario. But still, we have to define the performance calculation of each process (considering the CPU load, memory usage, database accessing, IPC access etc) and provide it as one of the input to genetic algorithm.

I am not sure if any of our forum members are aware of this genetic algorithm(GA) concept. If anyone knows a good GA site/forum from where we can grab some information, pls let me know.

Thanks