There are no hard rules about what makes a
StarTeam configuration small, medium, or large. However, for our purposes, we’ll use these definitions based on concurrent users:
- Small configuration
- < 50 concurrent users.
- Medium configuration
- < 200 concurrent users.
- Large configuration
- > 200 concurrent users or more.
The concurrent user count, rather than data volume or type of users, seems to be the best metric for judging configuration
size for purposes of deployment planning. In our experience, the amount of data managed by a
StarTeam configuration (particularly items) tends to grow proportionally with the number of projects and views, which grow in proportion
to the team size. Moreover, the ratio of online users to bulk applications tends to be roughly the same across organization
sizes.
So how big can a configuration get? To date, we’ve seen single
StarTeam instances with over 500 concurrent users, over 10,000 total “defined” users, over 4,000 views, tens of millions of items,
and up to a terabyte of vault data. With continuous hardware advances and software improvements, these limits get pushed every
year.
Note: Not all of these limits have been reached by the same configuration. Although some customers have 4,000 views, not all are
actively used. A customer with 10,000 total users typically sees 250-300 concurrent users during peak periods. Interestingly,
however, the amount of data managed by the vault seems to have little effect on performance or scalability.
The factors to consider as a configuration size increases are:
- Start-up Time
- The
StarTeam Server process performs certain maintenance tasks when it starts such as purging aged audit and security records in the database.
As the amount of activity and time-between-restarts increases, these tasks increase the start-up time. Also, start-up time
is affected by the number of unique “share trees” due to initial caches built at start-up time. With well-tuned options, even
a large server can start in a few minutes, but it can also take up to 15 minutes or more.
- Memory Usage
- The
StarTeam Server process’s memory usage is affected by several factors such as the total number of items, the server caching option settings,
the number of active sessions (concurrent users), the number of active views, and the number of command threads required.
Caching options can be used to manage memory usage to a point, but sessions, active views, and other run-time factors dictate
a certain amount of memory usage. On a 32-bit
Microsoft Windows platform, the
StarTeam Server process is limited to 2 GB of virtual memory. If you enable 4 GT RAM Tuning, which boosts the virtual memory limit of a single
process on a 32-bit system, this limit can be pushed closer to 3 GB. Running 32-bit on 64-bit operating system allows the
process to grow up to 4 GB. Running Native 64-bit removes memory restrictions and you are constrained by the physical memory
available on the server.
Tip: It is highly recommended to use the 64-bit version of the
StarTeam Server for better performance and scalability.
- Command Size
- Some client requests return a variable response size based on the number of items requested, the number of users or groups
defined, the number of labels owned by a view, and so forth. Large server configurations can cause certain commands to return
large responses, which take longer to transfer, especially on slower networks. Clients will see this as reduced performance
for certain operations such as opening a project or a custom form.