AceMapper Hardware Requirements
Introduction
AceMapper is a Client/Server application. This document discusses some of the hardware requirements for both sides of the application.
Client
The AceMapper Windows client requires a modern PC with sufficient RAM to provide acceptable performance. A minimum hardware configuration, for example, is 3.0+ GHz with 6 cores and 8 GB of RAM (especially if the file sizes are over 100K applications). Multiple monitors are recommended for optimal productivity. If the database is running on the same machine (using SQL Express) the requirements are necessarily higher (especially RAM).
There are two main processes that can take many hours to complete. These times will be greatly improved with more powerful client hardware configurations.
Database access uses either SQL Server Native Client (SQLNCLI) or OLE DB Driver for SQL Server (MSOLEDBSQL). The recommended version is the latest OLE DB Driver for SQL Server, which is installed by the AceMapper Setup program. The AceMapper About Box shows which driver is being used.
Server
AceMapper supports either a SQL Express (i.e. Desktop Edition) database or a SQL Server database. The selection of the server type (Express versus SQL Server) depends on the size of the application files and the number of people performing concurrent mapping.
Generally, SQL Express installations should be reserved for single-user implementations limited to small application files (less than 100K record files). Two users might be able to do mapping at the same time, but we would not recommend trying to do more than one “Create Application” or “Compression” function at the same time against an Express installation.
For optimal performance, a full SQL Server implementation should be configured with 32GB+ RAM and a processor greater than 3.0 GHz (with 16 cores). Sizing should take into account the number of concurrent users and the size of the application files.
Network Bandwidth
Although stored procedures are used to perform all SQL functions, most of the processing is done on the client. This means that the network can become a bottleneck since the data must be sent back to the client. For this reason, 100-Base or better network connections are recommended. For WAN environments, Remote Desktop Services is the only appropriate solution (see below).
Remote Access Configuration
Remote desktop solutions (e.g. Microsoft RDS, TSPlus, Citrix) are the only recommended ways for remote users to use this software. See this article for more information.