Running the LH service. Every month I have to copy several tables to take a snapshot of our system. Before switching to the Win2k server we had a Netware 4.11 server.

Copying the tables now takes roughly 2x as long as before. Network utilization on the client is only about 8% (100mb NIC) and at the server it's roughly 0% (1GB Nic).

Any Ideas on how to get back the speed I had previously? Client hardware hasn't changed and the server is Vastly more powerful than out netware server was.

Is everyone logged out? How are you doing the copy?

The Sprezzatura Group

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

There are Windows users on the system but nobody in the Arev Database. The copy is a simple "copytable tablename new_location application_name tablename." on about 14 tables.

This month it's taking forever. With a freshly booted Netware 4.11 it could take as little as 5 minutes (Sept '01), This month it's been over 90 minutes and counting. Last month it took 27:29.

Firstly what is the time difference on the corresponding DOS copies? By their very nature copies on Windows servers are slower than copies on Novell servers. If the time difference on a DOS copy is significant we'd be tempted to recode the copy table as a DOS level copy.

The Sprezzatura Group

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

If you mean copying the database using Xcopy or the like, I can copy the entire database (except REVLOCKS) in about 15 minutes (From one directory to another on the server via a client PC, it takes less than 5 minutes if I do it on the console) when I do Backups. (This includes 2 copies of all the tables that I copy for EOM). A pair of the tables have a relational index that I remove prior to doing the copy then put back on after performing the copy.

Then we'd write a program to do this - given the program can be written in minutes to hours and investigating the cause of the slowdown might take days . You COULD try turning the service off during the copy and see if this improves things (counter intuitive as this may seem). Alternatively someone else may have better ideas.

The Sprezzatura Group

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

I don't quite understand the internals in depth but are you saying I could copy the .lk and .ov files from one directory to the other without using copytable?

Well you would need to understand the internals a bit. But essential the REVMEDIA.* files are just a special kind of linear hash file that says to the system REV99999.* is my SALES_LEDGER table, REV11111.* is my CUSTOMERS table etc. So depending on your exact requirement you COULD just copy the REVMEDIA file and the relevant LK and OV files to a new location. This would introduce some complications depending on how you use these files later as you can't have two REVMEDIAs with the same internal name attached at the same time otherwise indexing gets confused.

But in essence - yes.

The Sprezzatura Group

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

Correct me if I'm wrong but based on what I'm seeing I can just copy my entire directory, then load the revmedia.lk file in an editor and change the volume date and viola… Looks like it worked actually, I used vi on my linux box to change the volume name in the revmedia.lk file (Just changed the year).

Any other implications I should look out for? If this is safe I can shorten my EOM process to about 10 minutes.

You CAN do that but you'll no longer be able to apply index updates to that volume as the volume name in the index won't match the volume name in the REVMEDIA.

The Sprezzatura Group

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

But if it's purpose is to be a static snapshot (no changes means no index updates) this should work. I'm done for tonight but would I need to remove/recreate all indexes or would just rebuilding them work?

Thanks for your help, I'm going home.

Remove/Recreate. This restamps the index code with the new volume name.

The Sprezzatura Group

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

We have done a lot of benchmarking to compare Novell and Windows servers. Generally speaking, Windows servers are much slower than Novell (although there are some recent problems with XP on Novell).

However, we discovered one way to make operations fly on Windows servers. Simply log directly onto the server (or use Terminal services) and run your file copy operation directly on the server with no workstation. It will be about 10 times faster.

Our benchmarks measure transactions per second, and the numbers always vary some with hardware and configuration… Windows workstations talking to a Windows server typically process 150 to 300 tps. Windows workstations talking to a Novell server typically process 900 to 1300 tps. Logging directly onto the Windows server typically processes 2300 to 2800 tps.

I thought we weren't supposed to use a Windows server as an ARev Workstation for a variety of reasons. File locking and other service issues being among them.

Works fine, if not great.

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