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Need help to determine slow response with ASA dbsrv8

Former Member
2,003

Hello,

We are using a 3rd party product running under Sybase 8 (dbsrv8.exe) and we are experiencing extreme slowdowns at all of our 42 POS terminals at peak periods (breakfast, lunch & dinner).

The vendor had rebuilt our database back in December and since then, there have been intermittent "freezes" across the board. They are unable to determine what the cause is.

I've spent the last month monitoring performance and resources on the server and I see some telling activity.

Only in the last couple of days have I convinced the vendor to give me SA access to the database, but I would love some help in pinpointing the issue so that I may go back to them and ask that they fix it.

I'm not a DBA. I'm a programmer and analyst and have extensive experience with Oracle and MySQL.

Here's what I see on the server end:

  • Hundreds (approx. 500) of TCP connections to dbsrv8.exe. Sometimes up to 40 or 50 connections from a single POS terminal.
  • Erratic disk activity. Fluctuations from 10,000 to 250,000,000 MB/Sec all pointing to dbsrv8.exe and the associated db.
  • Memory is pretty stable at 16Gb.
  • CPU is also very erratic. When I had 4 CPUs, utilization would climb to 80 or 90% and often peak at 100%. Since I increased to 8CPUs I see a peak of 60 to 80%.

Although I have a VNC view of a dozen POS terminals, there is nothing that is obvious on the performance monitor when one or more terminals freeze up.

Now it's time for me to do some database monitoring and see where the bottlenecks may be and for that I would appreciate a bit of help.

Please let me know if I can provide more information.

If someone can point me in the right direction, that would be great.

Thank you,

Elie

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Answers (1)

Answers (1)

Breck_Carter
Participant
0 Kudos

Foxhound is the only database performance monitor that works with target databases running on SQL Anywhere 8.

It does require SQL Anywhere 16 or 17 to be installed to support Foxhound's own database, and SQL Anywhere 8 doesn't provide as many performance statistics as later versions, but...

...the following screenshot of a busy SQL Anywhere 8 database with over 100 connections gives an idea of what's available:

Former Member
0 Kudos

Great! I'll give it a look.

The scary thing in all this is that there is no Dev, Test or QA environment. This production-only environment is what I adopted. It's on my to-do to clone this server in the near future.

That being said, is there any risk of installing Foxhound and SQLA 16 on the same server as SQLA 8. Will they play nice together?

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hmm. SQLA 17 is $1,000 (can't do that) and SQLA 16 Dev is difficult to find.

VolkerBarth
Contributor
0 Kudos

There's also a v17 dev. edition available.