EG connectivity to Workspace Server - minimum speed

[nwelke]

Hi all,

Has anyone run into a minimum speed or bandwidth requirement for the connection between EG and Workspace (and Metadata) server? We're working with a client that has a central SAS server at one site and several analysts at another site - and the two are connected with a fairly old and slow link. Increasing the bandwidth is costly and moving the server is not an option for reasons beyond our control. To justify the expense of increasing the bandwidth I need to provide a "minimum viable" speed and am hoping for some anecdotal information from the community...

TIA
Nick

[Doc_Duke]

Nick,

I don't know about "minimum viable" but there are other ways to explore than just to beef up the bandwidth.

For instance a Citrix server at the same location at the workspace server could reduce the traffic a lot and not have near the recurring costs of dedicated broadband. If "several analysts" is relatively small, a rack of virtual machines at the server site could accomplish a similar goal using the Microsoft mstsc command. Both of those approaches just transfer the image and the keystrokes to the analyst's PC.

Doc Muhlbaier
Duke

[nwelke]

Thanks Doc - you've described some of the alternatives we're presenting to the customer but each of them has a price tag, and to compare them quantitatively (time and money) they want to know how much it would cost to bring the bandwidth up to "acceptable" levels, hence the need to know what constitutes an acceptable level.

Nick

[SASKiwi]

My suggestion is that traffic be monitored on this slow link to determine when and how often the line capacity is "maxing out". Perhaps this has happened already. If not then this would help establish a baseline level of performance to correlate with when response times become unacceptable. It may even be possible to run some simple tests with just one or two EG users and monitoring the line at the same time.

Really I don't think there are any magic numbers you could use as network usage is so site-specific. Also what about non-SAS traffic on this line? At least line monitoring should give you some real numbers to justify the expense of doing an upgrade.

[boschy]

If you are using LDAP to authenticate users and groups via PAM, you'll need to install and run the Name Server Caching Daemon (NSCD). However you probably would not have gotten this far without it....it's pretty much essential for this config.