Re: [Mifos-developer] RE: Connection Speeds and Performance (Was FW: Approaches for synchronization)

[William P. <wi...@sc...>]

Steve Mushero wrote:
> Some observations:
>
> We are talking 120,000 xacts/day at launch for V1 (max) - and someone 
> is proposing to execute those via logs to the home office ?  That's 
> transactions, not SQL statements, which are probably 1 million/day or 
> more - from files, every day ??

I'd have to agree that this sounds implausible to me given the limited 
connectivity. If people only need reports, then having the home office 
suck in tens or hundreds of megabytes daily over thin pipes seems like a 
lot.

> And 400GB of data at HO ? [...]

Given the clear boundary between branches, it sounds like rather than 
trying to scale by making the HO machine bigger and bigger, the better 
option is a federated approach, where you have a stack of cheap servers, 
each running N branches, perhaps with central user apps running on their 
own machine.

> I think 20kbps is absurdly slow for any browser-based app - will 
> people be doing data entry over this line ?  If so, you should very 
> seriously consider a mainframe style text interface for data entry - 
> 1KB pages, etc.  Not a single graphic or style sheet or anything - 
> remember process productivity is measured in seconds.  I am not sure 
> how the 8-9kbps was calculated, but I'd suggest trying a 9600 baud 
> modem to enjoy the blazing speed - I think you'll find you need 
> 64-128kbps to make things even usable.

Style sheets and graphics should be cached, so I don't see them as a big 
problem. The rendered HTML will be an issue, though, and I think latency 
will be the real killer. The simplest solution is batch entry screens 
for common data entry operations, so that key users can go longer 
between server hits. Another plausible alternative is some sort of frame 
or iframe approach so that we transfer only the form rather than the 
whole page around it.

The next logical step to improving low-bandwidth performance via some 
sort of client-server approach. AJAX strikes me as the best approach if 
we can assume reasonably modern browsers. If not, Java and Flash are 
both plausible cross-platform options.


William