Performance Suite- Frequently Asked Questions

Is Perfect-whatever compatible with some-other-application?
Yes. Our products are perfectly safe running with other software. We are always ready to discuss a particular vendor's products and concerns. We haven't found any incompatibilities in a long time, though.

What is MUMPS? Why should I care?
MUMPS is an application that looks like an operating system to users. MUMPS is designed for keeping track of things like patient records, loan records, banking information and the like, and is quite user-friendly.

The key thing that we have to know about MUMPS is that there is a huge file, sometimes called MUMPS.DAT, which is always open. In the past, no defragmenter could defragment the file for this reason. But now, Raxco has UltraDisk!

Will any Raxco products help organizations with MUMPS? The answer is, "Maybe." Raxco's tuner will tune the system, the cacher will cache disks, and maybe the optimizer will defragment the disks. Today, Raxco's UltraDisk-PerfectDisk package is the only software that will defragment open files on OpenVMS systems. The maybe comes into play only if the file is too large. It seems that since disks have gotten bigger, and machines have gotten faster, and computers have taken over the world, the MUMPS.DAT file has gotten quite large at many locations, too. So large, in fact, the there's no way yet of defragging the thing. But, we will be able to defrag everything else.

Do I need to license PerfectCache/UltraDisk on all of my machines?
Sometimes. This will vary from configuration to configuration. With UltraDisk, the determination is rather simple: you must have a license for each machine that has a disk (or the disks) mounted. Period.

With PerfectCache, it's a little more difficult to explain. The usual answer is "Yes." Furthermore, for performance reasons, you want to have PerfectCache running on as many machines as possible. But there are some technical restrictions that set the requirements of which machines must be running the cacher. PerfectCache must be running on any machine that shares physical access to a given disk. Like DSSI and CI (HSC-based) clusters. FDDI clusters, too. But if disks are locally connected to a given machine, then there is no technical reason that the cacher be run on other machines. That is because the path to the disk goes through the hosting machine, and all I/Os must go through that hosting machine. But at the end of the day, it should be run everywhere. The machines will all run a lot better. If you can't buy a license for a machine, you can run the signalling module there and cache elsewhere.