Hi All,
Here is the scenario. (apologies, a long story)
We are currently running APEX 5.1 on Standard edition 12.0.1.0. running a department app with on average 70 users on a 4 year old Xeon processor with a cpu mark of about 9000
Its a departmental finance application application. Performs well with page views averaging 60,000- 80,000 on any given week day. (7.30am - 4.30 pm). with approx 70-80 users. avergage page response time is approx .25. So all good.
Now. The company has an old application written many years ago used daily, as well as a SQL$Server .Net c# Dev Express application that is extremely slow. Together these applications are used by at a (guess). 250 - 300 people. The company is looking at options to migrate the old application, and either speed up or replace the SQL$Server .Net Dev Express application.
All options are open, and given that Oracle APEX and the associated application is viewed positively (and the Oracle database in general), an option would could be to buy a new server and look at migrating first the old application, then possibly the .Net application to Oracle.
However license cost is also a big concern, and they would only go for standard edition (for a new server). (they've already bought their SQL Server licenses) so there is a sunk cost there. They have investment in C# developers, so there is also investment there.
The big concern for the decision team. (and its early days) is the risk that standard edition 2 could be too limiting with its 2 sockets and a maximum of 16 threads limit. Next stop would be the price hike to EE of 2.5 times the cost if they hit a wall in performance.
I've read various articles on how to scale.. database and SQL tuning is key etc.. I've also in my mind that 250 people can only do so much work at any one time..
So to my point. I'm looking at how I approach this objectively to decide whether APEX SE2 would be up for the job. I know I need to gather a lot more information about the systems that need migrating / upgrading. Workloads, type of queries average / peak usage etc. So any hints on that would be useful.
I'd also like to benchmark/load test the current APEX system on, to see how far I can push it before it runs out of steam, which give me some kind of feel of the workload the current server could handle.. Also possible build a small app with a few pages with data from the other apps to test.
Does anyone know of a load test tool or approach I could use that I could use to test? (Yes I know Oracle has Application load testing suite). Something simpler. What would be the best approach to load test. (Im assuming just hitting it with a shell script with curl is a bit primitive...
its interesting that I see lots of apex.com serves x number of million pages per day and others, but it doesn't detail what the hardware is. Id be very interested in some of the info into what hardware various solutions are running on..
Any other useful info or observations or approaches would be welcome..
Rgds
Richard