If your processor is often around 30-50%, you obviously aren't limited in performance by the processor.
What is your current performance bottleneck? Is it the memory quantity (in other words; you are running 100% memory pretty frequently), or disk IO (are you using maybe 2 7200rpm drives and you are doing 80 IOPS pretty frequently).
Since you have raid 1, this is one of the bottle necks, as the disks in on LSI based adapter in raid 1 do not read from both disks at the same time nor do they write to both mirror disks at the same time.
Writes are committed to one of the mirror drives, then once committed, the second drive is written to, which causes delays, unless the server is very lightly used.
Reads are only from one of the mirrored disks.
Raid 10 would greatly improve disk performance, or if your users primarily read info versus writing data, raid 5 would be a decent choice.
Another possible bottle neck... are you running 64bit OS with enough ram, and a 64 bit SQL version, so it can utilize more memory; though the raid 1 is a primary bottleneck.
Another possiblity... is you network cabling up to CAT certication .
Actually, the raid could be a bottleneck. It will only be a bottleneck if you're pushing for more than ~80 IOPS or more than 100MB/s. If you're not doing anything near these numbers, the raid 1 isn't a bottleneck.
The only way to determine what will improve your speeds, is to start by figuring out what your bottleneck is.
Even if you were to go with 2 enterprise level SSDs in a raid 1, if the disk performance isn't your bottleneck, upgrading to faster disks won't make your setup any faster. The same applies to the network cabling, processor power and/or memory quantity.
I'd suggest to hire someone that can ID your performance bottleneck (this could be as structural as the DB design in general, which would mean you could get better performance w/o needing to upgrade any hardware). Once you determine the bottleneck, address that bottleneck.
Note: you'll always have a bottleneck somewhere, otherwise you'd have unlimited speed.
Dev Mgr
4 Operator
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9.3K Posts
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August 15th, 2011 07:00
If your processor is often around 30-50%, you obviously aren't limited in performance by the processor.
What is your current performance bottleneck? Is it the memory quantity (in other words; you are running 100% memory pretty frequently), or disk IO (are you using maybe 2 7200rpm drives and you are doing 80 IOPS pretty frequently).
Graemepirie1
2 Posts
0
August 15th, 2011 08:00
Silly as it may sound - I don't know how to find out...
I can select "Porcessor %" in performance monitor but have no idea how to find out where bottlenecks are etc.
pcmeiners
4 Operator
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1.8K Posts
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August 15th, 2011 12:00
Since you have raid 1, this is one of the bottle necks, as the disks in on LSI based adapter in raid 1 do not read from both disks at the same time nor do they write to both mirror disks at the same time.
Writes are committed to one of the mirror drives, then once committed, the second drive is written to, which causes delays, unless the server is very lightly used.
Reads are only from one of the mirrored disks.
Raid 10 would greatly improve disk performance, or if your users primarily read info versus writing data, raid 5 would be a decent choice.
Another possible bottle neck... are you running 64bit OS with enough ram, and a 64 bit SQL version, so it can utilize more memory; though the raid 1 is a primary bottleneck.
Another possiblity... is you network cabling up to CAT certication .
Dev Mgr
4 Operator
•
9.3K Posts
0
August 15th, 2011 13:00
Actually, the raid could be a bottleneck. It will only be a bottleneck if you're pushing for more than ~80 IOPS or more than 100MB/s. If you're not doing anything near these numbers, the raid 1 isn't a bottleneck.
The only way to determine what will improve your speeds, is to start by figuring out what your bottleneck is.
Even if you were to go with 2 enterprise level SSDs in a raid 1, if the disk performance isn't your bottleneck, upgrading to faster disks won't make your setup any faster. The same applies to the network cabling, processor power and/or memory quantity.
I'd suggest to hire someone that can ID your performance bottleneck (this could be as structural as the DB design in general, which would mean you could get better performance w/o needing to upgrade any hardware). Once you determine the bottleneck, address that bottleneck.
Note: you'll always have a bottleneck somewhere, otherwise you'd have unlimited speed.