Recommendations for Optimal SOS performance

[lbauer]

For optimal SOS performance, here is a checklist of recommended configurations for the SOS Server installation.

1. The SOS Server should be installed on a machine with adequate resources. This will depend on usage, so we can't give specific recommendations. However a Pentium®4 processor, 520, 2.8GHz, 1 GB RAM, is a good starting point if you have 10 users. The machine with the VSS database(s) also should have adequate resources. If these machines are running other apps, being used as file servers, etc., SOS and VSS may be competing for system resources.

2. For best results, the SOS Server should run on a single processor machine. There are problems with how the VSS automation component is accessed on a dual processor machine and this degrades performance. We don't know if there are problems with hosting the VSS database on a dual processor machine. So if you have the choice, we'd suggest using single-processor machine for VSS.

3. Neither the SOS Server machines nor the VSS database machine should be running real time anti-virus protection.

http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?t=41.

4. Run Analyze regularly on all databases that SOS connects to. Microsoft recommends doing this weekly. We recommend running Analyze with the -f and then -c parameters.

http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?t=50

5. The version of the VSS Automation component is important because all communication with the VSS databases goes through the Automation component. The most stable version of VSS for SOS is VSS 6.0c with Microsoft's Hotfix. Install this if you haven't already. You can download it from this link:

http://download.sourcegear.com/files/vss_60c_hotfix.zip

Follow instructions in the Hotfix text file. The contents of the zip archive need to be copied to the VSS\Win32 directory of your SOS Server machine.

Then, manually re-register the Automation Component on the SOS Server machine with the instructions from this KB article:

http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?t=255

In certain cases, you may need to use VSS 6.0d, ssapi.dll version 98.48.

Be sure to follow the steps in this KB article to avoid concurrency crashes with this version:

http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?t=10

SOS 4.1.2 and 4.2 also support the automation component for VSS 2005.

6. If you experiencing performance issues:
If you have more than 50 users connecting to many VSS databases, you may want to use multiple SOS Servers for "load balancing." We haven't tested this for optimal configuration, but it would make sense for more than one SOS Server to point to the most-used database, Also users should be divided up among the servers so fewer than 20 developers connect to a SOS specific server at any one time.