-----Original Message----- From: Sundy, Mike [mailto:MSundy at maxis.com] Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 2:19 PM To: perforce-user at perforce.com Subject: [p4] Performance gains from migrating from Win32 to Linux?

Now that we have grown to nearly 280 Perforce users, we are feeling some performance strain from running Perforce 2002.1 on a Windows 2000 server with dual 800 Ghz CPU and 4 GB of RAM. Certain operations tend to be sluggish (especially p4 sync and p4 edit). We also see high CPU usage (spikes up to 70-80% several times a day). Our metadata is about 25 GB total. Our depot is 150 GB. We have about 4 million files in Perforce, including branches. 90% of our users run P4Win, with the rest running the Linux client. We are also starting to run low on disk space so we are taking this opportunity to evaluate options for our next Perforce server. We have done several things to improve performance on Windows, but it seems from anecdotal evidence that most large Perforce installations are running some flavor of Unix. I have read both Tech Note 3 and 10 on migrating and the Sys Admin guide, but I wanted some real world input.

We're thinking about migrating from Windows 2000 to Linux on XFS. I have a few questions for those of you who have migrated from Win32 to Unix:

Was there a large performance gain? 2x, 10x, 100x? Or was there no performance gain? Do you have any benchmarks showing performance improvement? How many users do you have? How big is your depot?

How much of your time was spent worrying about performance while you were on Win32? What percentage now that you are on Unix?

Do you feel the migration was worth it? Would you do it again?

How big of a problem is the case-sensitivity issue after migration (after the conversion)? Do you run a trigger or just enforce case standards through policy?

I greatly appreciate any comments you may have.

-Mike

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Mike Sundy

Perforce Administrator

Maxis, Inc.