Hello all,
Im posting this here in case it might help anyone else. Not so much of an AI issue as a networking issue, but it relates to specific questions regarding RICH. Most people who have visited have commented on the speed and no doubt wondered if it was a problem with the the architecture itself. this is excerpted and hopefully explains whats going on;
“There can be as much as an 80% variation in response times when asking the same question even on the same day when querying the instance on the production server, whereas an identical instance (same modules, same data,etc…) averages about (3) three seconds on the development machine. I think I finally traced what is going on. The machine that Im using for the RICH production server was originally a backup file server and its configured to use RAID 0 (mirrored) via the Windows software RAID. I had forgotten that when I set it up, it was ridiculously slow and when researching the problem discovered that this was simply an attribute (and major complaint) of the Windows RAID.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/10653-45-windows-software-raid-volume-extremely-slow
Having the RAID rebuild for no apparent reason seems to be something that happens with the Windows RAID, and that would explain the variance.
I used .NET when building RICH for security and other reasons, and In addition to the usual speed problems the use of the Windows RAID seems to be having an effect on how .NET is functioning. One of the advantages to ASP.net is that its supposed to compile once and then run fast forever. Its usually a significant advantage in speed. But something about the RAID seems to be causing .NET to compile on each query…sometimes. Thats something else that seems to be factoring into the speed variance. When I uploaded the changes detailed below and tested them RICH ran faster when executing the first query. (Still slow) The primary .dll was uploaded pre-compiled so I think that has something to do with it. I know that .NET maintains a checksum in order to determine if there has been changes to the source code so that it can re-compile if the source code changes, and maybe something about the RAID is corrupting the checksum at irregular intervals. I dont know, but its probably isnt worth trying to make it work, the solution is to get RICH off this box. I’ve thought about just going in and breaking the mirror, but in doing that I run the risk of the drives becoming corrupted which would cause me to go from"slow speed” to “no speed”. “
Anyway, thats what Ive discovered, and if there is a lesson here that can be used elsewhere it is
NEVER USE SOFTWARE RAID
Im hoping to have the problem resolved this week and get the production speed to a point where it is comparable to the development machine. In the meantime thanks for bearing with the slow response times.
Vince