Multithreaded EXE servers vs MTS

[Nick Bryson]

Dan,

I really appreciate the books you put out they have helped me alot in understanding
VB,COM and Windows in general.

Anyway, my questions is:
I'm developing some objects that perform billing calculations. I generally
have several hundred thousand (power)bills I need to calculate and it can
take a while. We're adding alot more customers daily. I have a couple of
NT servers each with 4-processors. I'm thinking of using a multithreaded
EXE server to perform thread creation. I was wondering if using MTS would
be a better idea. I don't know much about MTS and learning it would probably
be a significant investment. I just looking for some direction.

Thanks,
Nick Bryson

[Dan Appleman]

Large scale applications is what MTS was designed for. The key question when figuring
out your scaling needs is the number of simultaneous operations. Let's say you have a
million bills to process once a month. That is:
33000 a day 555 a minute. Of course, you might not have them evenly spaced....
and I don't know how long it takes to process a bill...

My gut feel is that this sounds like a major transaction based system, and trying to
goose performance by adding threads in an EXE server isn't going to be satisfactory.
Check out MTS. I've on occasion questioned Microsoft's strategies in trying to sell
"one size fits all" big system solutions to everyone (like small businesses). But when
you have a big complex system to deal with, their recommended strategies are often
right on the money.

Dan


Nick Bryson wrote:

> Dan,
>
> I really appreciate the books you put out they have helped me alot in understanding
> VB,COM and Windows in general.
>
> Anyway, my questions is:
> I'm developing some objects that perform billing calculations. I generally
> have several hundred thousand (power)bills I need to calculate and it can
> take a while. We're adding alot more customers daily. I have a couple of
> NT servers each with 4-processors. I'm thinking of using a multithreaded
> EXE server to perform thread creation. I was wondering if using MTS would
> be a better idea. I don't know much about MTS and learning it would probably
> be a significant investment. I just looking for some direction.
>
> Thanks,
> Nick Bryson