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