You should make a RAM disk and copy the dataset into there. Does the dataset stay the same each run? If so, you’ll really get a boost.
But investigate performance monitoring tools to get a better idea of your bottlenecks. The stats you posted showed a 27% gain* going from 1 instance to 2. That is not very good. Looking at the Amazon rates, why don’t you just rent out 4 High-CPU Medium servers instead of trying to load up one High-CPU Extra Large? I almost guarantee you’ll get much better performance.
I like the RAMDISK idea, a lot.
The app in question costs $50/mo per computer, otherwise just firing up gobs of High-CPU Medium instances would be the best solution by far.
Even so, I’ll do the math. Buying another 3 licenses for the app and running 4 concurrent systems with 2 instances each may ultimately be the best solution.
Uh, wait. About the RAMDISK, I’m on a system with 1.7 GB of RAM and my dataset is 1.5 GB.
Probably gonna’ be a problem. May want to try the next system up for RAM…
You’ve got a pagefile you can use. 1.5GB + .1 for your app + .1 for windows might be ok (depending which way all the numbers were rounded). Certainly start by turning off all the processes and services you don’t need. I’ve had win2k3 run inside 50 megabytes after being massively nLite’d.
Ah, that sucks indeed. I thought it would work, but clearly as a command-line app, it’s doing some checking to see that it’s the only instance of the process. Is there a Windows launcher that might behave better?
Something I found while trawling the net in search of potential solutions is VMWare ThinApp: Virtual Applications | Virtual Apps | ThinApp | VMware. It has a 60-day trial, which might be long enough for you to get your analysis done.
It’s an application virtualisation solution that allows you to package and run multiple apps as single .exe files, isolated from the OS and without needing to install anything physically. I haven’t looked into it, but it might be one way around this.
If all else fails, 5 CALs for Terminal Services will set you back around $400, but I’m not sure if those can be resold or not.
He can’t run ThinApp on Amazon EC2 because it’d be trying to do virtualization inside virtualization.
I haven’t look into RAM disks in a while. I remember there was no clear winner in the space, but maybe things have changed. Honestly I’m not sure if a RAM disk will be an absolute win. Remember, the OS already caches file accesses in RAM (but often it doesn’t do it with absolute efficiency).
Good point, there.
Amazon EC2, in its current form, is Xen with available iSCSI drives.
I’m tempted to try putting the “big data set” on, perhaps, a RAID 0 spread across 12 5 GB RAID drives, but I suspect the network overhead would make that slower than just using the C: drive available to the system in the local “Xen” host.
There are restrictions on who can get it. You have to be a resaler, OEM, or other IT company that sales, or recomends products to other companies. Also the licenses are only good for 1 year unless you renew your membership each year. There is another version that is geared to developers as well.
Terminal Services running in Application Licensing mode can be licensed on a temporary basis. Install Terminal Services in Application mode and set the Licensing mode to Per Device. Install Terminal Services Licensing. Activate the TS licensing server. The temporary Per Device CALs will work for 90 days.