Deployment for 250 Clients with a poor communicationlink

Question

Hello guys :
We're currently working with Forte 3.0.J.1.
We have two questions :
1.- We have a big application and when we deploy it the client
partition is quite large.
The size of the standard partition image repositories (*.btd,
*.btx) is 7436 Kb.
We then need to distribute the client files over a LAN (5% of the
users) and over a
WAN (96% of the users). Most of the users have a poor communication
link ( 9600 bps !!!! ).
We have two schemes for the distribution :
a).- Configuration of the client machine ( forte control panel with
flag :
cfg:em:2:2:2. In this case, the client partition must be
manually copied.
This takes 50 minutes to copy via ftp. This flag requires
the file being executed
using ftexec -fi parameter.
b).- Normal Forte mechanism, the client partition is being
copied automatically once
forte detects a difference with the current file. This
takes 56 minutes via
the Forte environment.
Is there somebody having the same scenario ( low speed
communications links ), if so
can you share your experience with us?. Apart from that, we are
having quite good
response time inside the application.
2.- What is the minimal configuration in memory (RAM) for a Central
Server Node ( only Forte
environment ). The machine is an Alpha 4100 with 1GB of RAM running
Alpha Unix 4.0.D, the database is
Sybase Adaptive Server 11.9.3 with 250 to 300 concurrent forté
users.
Regards
JAEB.
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Answer 1

Hi,
We've similar situation here but a little bit better. What we did was:
1. We gzipped all the client btrees under appdist after deployment but
before download.
2. We wrote our own "Launcher" which would do one extra step - unzip
the client btree before launching the client with normal launchservice.
One drawback of this approach is that you will need
1. hard-coding on unzipping the btree ( like hard-code for behaviour
under Windows, Mac or UNIX )
2. carefully designed application name. Note that Forte save the files
in only 8 characters. Any name longer than that will be truncated with
sequence number for the 8th character.
One more thing that we've observed over WAN. When the traffic is really
high and when we have a deployment, the nodemgr will crash claiming that it
is out of memory. However, when we check the trace, the memory allocated by
-fm is far more than enough. Thus, I suspected that when the download is
slow, the nodemgr is flood with threads trying to download the applet to the
client. And it is the thread manager that got boomed when there is really a
lot of users. So beware.
Regards,
Peter Sham.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jorge Espinoza [SMTP:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 1999 1:18 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Deployment for 250 Clients with a poor communication
link
Hello guys :
We're currently working with Forte 3.0.J.1.
We have two questions :
1.- We have a big application and when we deploy it the client
partition is quite large.
The size of the standard partition image repositories (*.btd,
*.btx) is 7436 Kb.
We then need to distribute the client files over a LAN (5% of
the
users) and over a
WAN (96% of the users). Most of the users have a poor
communication
link ( 9600 bps !!!! ).
We have two schemes for the distribution :
a).- Configuration of the client machine ( forte control
panel with
flag :
cfg:em:2:2:2. In this case, the client partition must
be
manually copied.
This takes 50 minutes to copy via ftp. This flag
requires
the file being executed
using ftexec -fi parameter.
b).- Normal Forte mechanism, the client partition is being
copied automatically once
forte detects a difference with the current file. This
takes 56 minutes via
the Forte environment.
Is there somebody having the same scenario ( low speed
communications links ), if so
can you share your experience with us?. Apart from that, we are
having quite good
response time inside the application.
2.- What is the minimal configuration in memory (RAM) for a Central
Server Node ( only Forte
environment ). The machine is an Alpha 4100 with 1GB of RAM
running
Alpha Unix 4.0.D, the database is
Sybase Adaptive Server 11.9.3 with 250 to 300 concurrent fort&eacute;
users.
Regards
JAEB.
Do You Yahoo!?
Free instant messaging and more at http://messenger.yahoo.com
To unsubscribe, email '[email protected]' with
'unsubscribe forte-users' as the body of the message.
Searchable thread archive
<URL:http://pinehurst.sageit.com/listarchive/>
To unsubscribe, email '[email protected]' with
'unsubscribe forte-users' as the body of the message.
Searchable thread archive <URL:http://pinehurst.sageit.com/listarchive/>