Before upgrading your production systems to Adaptive Server 15.0, gather details about the performance characteristics of your applications in the production environment of the current, pre-15 version of Adaptive Server. Gathering such data provides a statistical basis for performance analysis.
To compare Adaptive Server 12.x and 15.0 performance, run:
Tests for as many application functions as possible, especially the most critical ones. For each function, measure the response time or throughput. If possible, perform these measurements for each query executed by the application.
Performance measurements in your current Adaptive Server 12.x production system.
The same function and performance measurement tests in a fully configured “test” system running Adaptive Server 15.0, with a copy of the full Adaptive Server 12.x production database, and a realistic workload. Run the same queries as in Adaptive Server 12.x, and with the same level of concurrent user activity. Capturing the “performance footprint” of your current Adaptive Server 12.x production environment provides a good baseline for any comparisons with Adaptive Server 15.0. The measurements you capture should include the number of logical I/O operations, elapsed time, compilation time, CPU utilization, showplan output, and so on. To enable a sensible comparison of performance in Adaptive Server 12.x and Adaptive Server 15.0, gather performance data at two levels, from:
Individual queries in isolation, and with a full workload run by multiple users
Adaptive Server as a whole, from a server-wide resource usage perspective
Several critical aspects affect performance numbers between Adaptive Server 12.x and 15. To avoid misleading performance numbers:
“Warm up” the cache in the same manner for both Adaptive Server 12.x and Adaptive Server 15.0 testing.
Use identical cache/buffer pool configurations.
Increase the procedure cache in Adaptive Server 15.0 to about 2 – 6 times the amount used in Adaptive Server 12.x.
Use similar data device layout and placement, especially for log devices and for tempdb.
Set up test systems where you can easily restore the original database after each test run, especially when data is modified during testing.
You may need to increase the size of the data cache
in Adaptive Server 15.0
