We just recently bought a brand new server to run our pervasive databases on. The server is replacing one that is 5 years old so we are expecting the see performance improvements.

The new server:
Dual 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Processors
6 GB RAM
400 GB Total SCSI Hard Disk Space in RAID
Pervasive Btrieve/Scalable SQL 7 SP6
Windows 2003 Server

A few of the tests that I have run so far (a rebuild on a 1.3GB file) have been faster than the current server but not as fast as I would expect or like. In fact, I can watch the server's performance during a stressful transaction such as this rebuild and it's hardly even scratching the surface of the server's power (2-4% CPU Usage).

I know there must be some settings that I can change to improve performance. I have already increased the Cache Allocation to 1.25 GB but when I try to increase to 2GB, the services will not start properly.

Another thing that bothers me is that the CPU usage is so low. I would expect that the database engine would use as much CPU as was available to perform its tasks.

Can someone suggest some settings that would help me realize the full potential of our new server.

Thank you,
Josh Breitbach
jpbreitb@rockwellcollins.com

First off, you're using an old version of the engine on a brand new server running an OS that was never tested or supported by Pervasive 7.0.
Secondly, Pervasive does not take advantage of multiple processors. Usually Btrieve is not CPU bound, it's I/O bound. Reading records from a database, any databse, is not CPU intensive, it's disk or memory intensive.
How big is your database? Does it fit completely in cache?
Another thing to consider is network traffic. If you've upgraded to a brand new server but are still running an old 10BaseT hub, then you're going to be limited there.
You need to find out where the bottleneck is. THere's a performance whitepaper on Pervasive's web site that is a good resource.

I would love to be on version 8 but I'm not sure it's a possibility
for us. The only reason we have a Pervasive server is for our
Production Managment software, Paradigm by Cimnet Systems. This
software uses pervasive v7. When asked about v8, they said that they
would not support it because in the next Paradigm version they are
copmletely switching to SQL Server. Therefore, they've never bothered
to update their software to be compatible with V8.

As far as running v7 on Win2003 server, I was told by the pervasive
company that it would run as long as I had the latest patches
installed and so far they appear to be correct. As for dual
processors, we have been running on a dual processor server for about
6 years now without issues relating to that.

I checked with our server admin and we are running RAID5 but she says
that the switch to RAID1 or RAID10 would cost us too much disk space.

I have my Pervasive Cache Allocation set to just over 1GB and it seems
to be working without errors. But if I try to set the cache to 2GB
the services will not start up correctly. We have 2 main DB's that run totaling 11GB.

I'm not really being left with many choices here. What can I do to
maximize what I have?

Thanks,
Josh Breitbach