Tech Ed 2007 Orlando Day 3

On day 3 of Tech Ed 2007, I delivered my first of 3 presentations.  This first one covered the Windows Mobile Line of Business Maturity Model that I created based on earlier work I did on mapping Infrastructure Optimization to Mobility.  In this presentation, I walked attendees through the levels of infrastructure maturity their respective organizations must have in order to deploy more sophisticated mobile line of business applications.  The slide below gives you a 30,000 ft perspective on the maturity model.

 

At the end of the presentation, rather than saying goodbye to my attendees, I invited them all on a field trip to my Mobile Merge Replication booth so I could show them what a truly mature level of infrastructure looks like.  I described how replication is one of the quickest and easiest ways to push enterprise data out to mobile employees in the field.  I then walked them through the 4-Tier Merge Replication architecture and described the sophistication of the hardware and networking equipment.  Since my microphone didn't work outside the TLC Theater, I had to deliver this unplanned part of my presentation at an extremely elevated vocal level (shouting) and thus I've almost lost my voice.

Oh, and by the way, we continued to see how far we could push a single IIS server via our Merge Replication test harness.  Day three's test results are as follows:

600 Subscribers:

  • IIS - CPU: 23% | Memory: 332 MB | Network Utilization: 2% | Disk: 12%
  • SQL Distributor - CPU: 7% | Memory: 6.68 GB | Network Utilization: .51% | Disk: 40%
  • SQL Publisher - CPU: 30% | Memory: 4.46 GB | Network Utilization: 1% | Disk: 2%
  • Client Sync Times - High: 40.3 Minutes | Low: 1.7 Sec | Avg: 8.8 Minutes

700 Subscribers:

  • IIS - CPU: 20% | Memory: 370 MB | Network Utilization: 1% | Disk: 6%
  • SQL Distributor - CPU: 5% | Memory: 7.01 GB | Network Utilization: .44% | Disk: 32%
  • SQL Publisher - CPU: 28% | Memory: 4.41 GB | Network Utilization: 1% | Disk: 1%
  • Client Sync Times - High: 76.8 Minutes | Low: 1.7 Sec | Avg: 20.1 Minutes

As you can see from the numbers above, our sync times are really starting to increase, but the load on the servers appears flat.  This is definitely a curious situation since you'd expect the server numbers be really high as the load has increased.  I'm speculating that I have too many workers threads running on IIS which is causing a lot of context switching overhead.  On Thursday, I going to move to 2 IIS servers and lower the .IN file, .OUT file, and SQL Reconciler thread pool count to just 10 threads each to see if that helps our situation.  Hopefully, less will be more.

We finished off Day 3 by running through a monsoon to go to the House of Blues.  Even though most of the people were soaked, the Blues Brothers revival band just rocked.  They looked and danced just like Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues.  Elwood even did cartwheels on stage.  They sang most of the songs from the Blues Brothers movie including:

  • Everybody Needs Somebody to Love
  • The theme from Rawhide
  • Sweet Home Chicago
  • Gimme Some Lovin'

I couldn't be happier!

Rob