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Subject: 4th Dimension Info Requested
From: William J. Bene, wjb@cscsun2.larc.nasa.gov
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1992 11:13:39 GMT
In article <BtJDus.CEv@news.larc.nasa.gov> William J. Bene,
wjb@cscsun2.larc.nasa.gov writes:
>Is anyone using 4th Dimension in a multiuser environment?  Any
information on 
>4D would be highly appreciated, but I am specifically looking for info
on the 
>limitations of such a set up.  Such as how many connections can be made
to a 
>single database file, how does mutiple connections or large datasets
degrade 
>performance, or any other info that could be useful if considering to
use 4D.
>Thanks in advance.
>
>Will
>
>=========================================================
>William J. Bene
>Computer Sciences Corporation
>wjb@cscsun2.larc.nasa.gov
>
>

We have just installed a pretty big Sales&Marketing product, developed in
4D, in Paris-France. At the moment, we use the Sales Dbase (around 8MB
and increasing daily) in a multi-user mode with 6 concurrent users. The
principal of multi-users is pretty simple. 4D maintains the login's of
all the users in a simple 2K file with the same name as the
database,suffixed with underscore symbol. So if database is called DBASE1
then the file is called DBASE1_. As far as I can ascertain,
theoratically, there is no limit on the number of on-line users. However:

Talking from an experience of a few months, I must say our biggest
headache is the performane.
The application runs on the Powerbook 170 with 8MB RAM. The dbase runs on
a Qudra-900 with 8MB RAM and 400MB H/D. However, since the Quadra
functions only as a "primitive file server" by every product enquiry,
around 5000 packet of data, like an army of ants, start marching across
the network. This causes the net. performance to reduce to a crawle pace.
We have done a lot of bench marking and done our best to optimize the
network. But if you are seriously considering using 4D in a multi-user
env., I'd advice you to wait until the 4D server is available.

We have some of the most powerfull machines that apple has to offer, and
a multi-million $ network and still with only 2 users doing some
simple,concurrent, product enquiry we are talking about an average
responce time of 50 Sec. and above.

I'm counting the days when we can have the 4D server running on the
quadra.

Shariar Jahromi