factory909 Posted July 7, 2009 Share Posted July 7, 2009 Im trying to get some documentation that deals with Network Load Balancing in Windows Server 2003. We have a SQL server at work with around 50 25-30 users reading/writing data to it at any given point. Our server has 2x gigabit ethernet cards in it. Can I load balance on one server with 2 nics? Will we see any performance gain? I did a performance counter on the network interface, and it stays pegged at 100. Just looking for some light to be shed on this subject. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CoffeeFiend Posted July 7, 2009 Share Posted July 7, 2009 Setting up load balancing in Windows won't automatically make SQL Sever load balance across 2 NICs.Not sure which perf counters you were monitoring, but I would be rather surprised if a couple dozen users managed to max out one gigabit port in the first place, and also CPU usage and disk I/O not being problematic either. I'd be having a serious look at the queries being run if that's the case! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
factory909 Posted July 7, 2009 Author Share Posted July 7, 2009 we don't control the queries. we installed charting/medical record software, and the company, built the sql server, we can not modify the queries. im just looking at any way to speed up performance any.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CoffeeFiend Posted July 7, 2009 Share Posted July 7, 2009 Still... Are you really sure the GBit port is connecting at that speed, and actually maxed out? Because with like 25 users, they would *all* have to pull 5MB/sec non-stop to max that out... It's hard to believe some patient data (mostly text I'm assuming) being looked at by couple dozen users uses 100MB+/second. 10Mbit? Sure. GBit? Sounds just about impossible.Perhaps you could list which counters you're going by (would be nice to know cpu/disk usage as well -- even just a perfmon screenie would be a start)Also, if the network load is that high, chances are it's not from SQL Server. That's definitely worth looking into. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
factory909 Posted July 7, 2009 Author Share Posted July 7, 2009 it is connected at 1GBps. I wanna say both Read/Write Bytes and then just Network Usage....it also pulls part of the application from SQL server. I take it since your a moderator you frequent these rooms quite often, so I will get a screen shot up tomorrow from the server. Any certain counters you would like to see?Still... Are you really sure the GBit port is connecting at that speed, and actually maxed out? Because with like 25 users, they would *all* have to pull 5MB/sec non-stop to max that out... It's hard to believe some patient data (mostly text I'm assuming) being looked at by couple dozen users uses 100MB+/second. 10Mbit? Sure. GBit? Sounds just about impossible.Perhaps you could list which counters you're going by (would be nice to know cpu/disk usage as well -- even just a perfmon screenie would be a start) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cluberti Posted July 7, 2009 Share Posted July 7, 2009 Might want to just get a perfwiz setup to monitor for awhile, then save the .blg off somewhere we can have a go at it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
factory909 Posted July 7, 2009 Author Share Posted July 7, 2009 well i ran the perfwiz for one hour during our peak usage. I added every counter to see which peaked, and which one was constantly over 50..heres what i found: everything looked normal, the the network counter Total Bandwidth stayed peaked at 100. Our server is an 8 processor, and 10GB of ram...i guess i am looking at every thing when it comes to this software we have to run. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cluberti Posted July 7, 2009 Share Posted July 7, 2009 Another question - is this a single-instance SQL server, or do you have multiple instances? If you've got multiple instances, perhaps Windows clustering (active/active) with instances on separate nodes might be better. If you've got a single-instance server, load balancing will make no difference in performance at all, as SQL rarely causes network saturation (and with 50 - 100 users on a Gb network, that is highly unlikely to be a problem). Usually SQL problems crop up as memory pressure or disk bottlenecks, not network issues (hence moving instances to cluster nodes to alleviate memory pressure and disk bottleneck issues). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
factory909 Posted July 7, 2009 Author Share Posted July 7, 2009 yeah..im just going to chauk it up to crappy software....i also ran performance advisor..under system health:CPU is idle or lowNetwork - Busiest network adapter is less than 15%memory 51% available mbytes 5028disk i/o 13 /sec highest disk i/o is less than 100/sec on disk xwell any other way to speed up a program? is started slowing down (slow load times) when the company gave us an update, and required we have all of our systems upgraded to .Net Framework 3.5. After that...its been a headache. So I have bandaided stuff here and there...thanks for the help guys Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cluberti Posted July 7, 2009 Share Posted July 7, 2009 yeah..im just going to chauk it up to crappy software....i also ran performance advisor..under system health:CPU is idle or lowNetwork - Busiest network adapter is less than 15%memory 51% available mbytes 5028disk i/o 13 /sec highest disk i/o is less than 100/sec on disk xwell any other way to speed up a program? is started slowing down (slow load times) when the company gave us an update, and required we have all of our systems upgraded to .Net Framework 3.5. After that...its been a headache. So I have bandaided stuff here and there...thanks for the help guysSo the problem isn't SQL, it seems to be the front-end app you're using? Might want to engage the vendor and do some perf monitoring on the machine(s) running the front-end to see what's going on. However, you probably want to have some data from a machine running the old software as a baseline to see differences though, and if the vendor requires the new software I'm not sure how feasible that is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
factory909 Posted July 7, 2009 Author Share Posted July 7, 2009 i think its going to be one of those "just have to take it" scenarios. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fizban2 Posted July 7, 2009 Share Posted July 7, 2009 is there anyway you can narrow down what function or query the end users are using that is believed to be "slow"? could this be a percpetion issue where that is the actual speed and time it takes for the query to run? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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