Making 3B2/310 faster

[Charlie Pilzer]

I have a client who is using a 3B2/310 for a relatively small (<10000 records)
database.  There are some users who are complaining that the machine is too
slow and would like to enhance the performance.  But they would like to do it
inexpensively if possible.

The current configuration is:  3B2/310, 2 Meg Memory, 72 MB disk, 2 Ports cards,
XM box with 23 MB tape drive.  Software is Sys V, rel 2.1.

I've talked with some other users who suggested that A) more memory might help,
B) a second disk might help, C) changing to Sys V, rel 3 might help.

I'm open to any suggestions, but in particular I'm curious about the following:

1)  The big culprit right now seems to be the disk.  I was thinking that
if I added a second disk and dedicated it to the database could I get more
performance.  What disks seem to give good performance?  Would it make a lot
of difference?

2)  Adding more memory can be expensive, because to go to 4 MB (the max) I wind
up with two 1 MB memory cards and no place to put them.  Also the price of the
memory quoted to me was relatively high.  Would adding memory make a significant
performance change? Where can I get less expensive memory boards?

3)  Some of the software in use now is available in object only and as far as
I know has not been ported to Sys V, ver 3 yet.  Can I take code that runs
under version 2 and just run it under version3?  Is version 3 faster than
version 2?  I did notice that changing from 2.0 (swapped) to 2.1 (paged) was
a noticable improvement.

Charlie Pilzer
Bear Track Computer Co.  netsys!beartrk!clp 301-588-0326