ProMapper Hardware Requirements

Introduction

ProMapper is a Client/Server application. This document discusses some of the hardware requirements for both sides of the application.

Client

The client executable program is about Windows 32bit application called ProMapper.exe. The application will require a fairly powerful machine to give acceptable performance. The install program ensures that the latest MDAC is installed on the computer (Windows XP and later has it pre-installed). A minimum hardware configuration is a 1 GHz processor with 1GB of RAM (especially if the file sizes are over 10000 applications) running at 800x600 or higher screen resolution. If the database is running on the same machine (using SQL Express) the requirements are necessarily higher.

There are two main processes that can take many hours to complete. These times will be greatly improved with more powerful client hardware configurations.

Server

ProMapper supports either a SQL Express (i.e. Desktop Edition) database or a SQL Server database through ADO. 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 a single machine installation using SQL Express and a 1 GHz processor with 1GB of RAM, the maximum file size with reasonable performance would be about 30-40K applications. For 100K applications, we recommend at least a 2 GHz processor and 2 GB of RAM with the database on the same machine. If SQL Express is running on a separate machine, 1GB of RAM should be adequate up to 300-400K applications. The faster the processor the better.

For optimal performance, a full SQL Server implementation should be configured with 16GB+ RAM and a processor greater than 2.0 GHz (multi-core).

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, Windows Terminal Services should be considered as an alternative.