Preferred Platform for Essbase?

Question

I am planning for an implementation of a large Essbase Cube which is about 1 GB in size and will have 3000 users and of them 300 concurrent.
I would appreciate your thoughts on the implementation and my questions are:
Which would you choose if you had 4 CPU's DualCore on:
1. Solaris on SUN SPARC
2. Windows 2003 64-Bit
and
3. Where is according to you the biggest user base, Solaris or Windows?
4. What is most stable, Solaris or Windows?
Your comments are very welcome, Lars

Answer 1

Matt,
I will elaborate some of the steps I took, with pleasure.
1. You are correct, the STACK setting was the first thing that support suggested, and setting it to the maximum (I believe that is 64K, we were at 8K) was a rather sizeable performance improvement.
2. The other suggestion I received from support was an undocumented (v7.1.5) setting for the calc. By default when blocks are brought in to memory they are expanded (dynamic calcs are performed). The setting is 'SET FRMLRTDYNAMIC OFF' which turns off the dynamic calcs. This also gave me a good performance boost. WARNING, your calc musn't rely on any dynamic calc'd members to take advantage of this.
These 2 suggestions, and some general tuning (for instance the CALCPARALLEL n windows was only using 3, on Solaris I could set it to 4), and making sure I had the fix's set up the most effecient way, etc, the script still ran in almost 30 minutes.
The last big performance gain (the one that got me back in the sub 2 minutes range) was stumbled upon. The script was using some functions (specifically '@MEMBER(@CONCATENATE(@NAME(@ANCEST("Time Periods",4)), " GLOBAL DRIVER"))') to try to resolve the name of a week's ancestor and concatenate that with " Global Driver" for a "period"s data entry member. During testing we noted that this worked for Period 1, but that it was resolving to Period 1 for all periods so I had to change it to hard coding. Well, Lo and behold that was also the performance issue. Solaris must have issues resolving the functions. So even though the script went from 100 or so lines to 1400 or so lines, it still ran much better (from 30 minutes to 2 minutes).
Even though I had a great learning experience through this, I still stand by my original comments that "Out of the box" essbase runs better on windows because I didn't have to tweak any of those things on windows.
Message was edited by:
RobertR