Multiple instances of TM1 on one multi core server

[RajKerai]

I'd be interested to hear of other sites' experience with running multiple TM1 instances on a modern server with lots of cores (4/8/etc).

Is anybody doing this? Do the different instances perform acceptably, and not get in each other's way?

We have 9.0 SP3 U9 in mind for this but experience with later versions would be valuable to hear too.

[Steve Rowe]

Hi Raj good to see you've found us!

I run a live and a dev server on 64 bit boxes and I don't think they trip over each other but that's not the same as having two live servers. I'm guessing it would depend on what the usage was going to be like.

If you are on 9.0 then most of the hard work a server does is single threaded so the multi-core stuff never really gets burdended anyway.

I've not moved past 9.0 yet but I'm sure you know that there can be significant differences in desgin between 9.0 and 9.4 systems.

Cheers,

[wissew]

We are running 9.1.4 on 64 & 32 bit boxes with 2 to 4 servers on our 32 boxes and 3 -5 on our 64s. We have set MaximumCubeLoadThreads=2 on most of the servers and have not been running into any problems with them stepping on each other. In fact, I'd call them extremely stable in that regard. Processes that over 5 minutes to run do not interfere with the other instances running on the server. Our 64 dev box has 64 and 32 bit servers running on it agian with out issues. Regarding your version choice I would go to 9.1.4. Many bugs and regressions that are in 9.1.3 and prior version have been fixed.

[RLReyes]

We currently have 2 servers (dev & production). Each server is running 2 TM1 service/database. Both servers are 64bit, 16GB of ram each, & 2 dual core each. The biggest improvement for us is the start up time of our TM1 service when we switch from 9.1 SP3 to 9.4 MR1 FP1. On 9.4 MR1 FP1, it takes about 15-20 minutes for TM1 to load compare to 35-40 minutes under 9.1 SP3 (Software upgrade only). We have set MaximumCubeLoadThreads=3.

[lotsaram]

There has been a lot of progress over the last few years but still the only thing TM1 multi-threads effectively is user requests. All data loads and calculations are single threaded. To really take advantage of lots of CPUs on a modern server a physical split out of TM1 server instances is a valid approach. It's reasonably common to run multiple TM1 server instances on a single box. As long as there are no server name conflicts within a single admin host I haven't ever seen any issues with this setup. You need to have fairly distinct application areas between servers though as TM1 doesn't provide any way of sharing information between databases in real time.

[Jeroen Eynikel]

There has been a lot of progress over the last few years but still the only thing TM1 multi-threads effectively is user requests. All data loads and calculations are single threaded. To really take advantage of lots of CPUs on a modern server a physical split out of TM1 server instances is a valid approach. It's reasonably common to run multiple TM1 server instances on a single box. As long as there are no server name conflicts within a single admin host I haven't ever seen any issues with this setup. You need to have fairly distinct application areas between servers though as TM1 doesn't provide any way of sharing information between databases in real time.

I had an issue recently with severel servers using the same admin host - even though the services themselves were running on seperate boxes.

TM1 9.1.4. Latency can not have been the cause (tested that)

One of the servers suffered from extreme performance drops when using the other machine as adminhost. As soon as I restarted that server to use itself as admin host the problems disappeared. The same servers used to run on 9.0 sp2 with that setup without any issues at all and afaik nothing changed other than the version of TM1.

I have not investigated deeply enough to conclude with certainty that it is a TM1 issue, but it seems likely.

On the whole though I have never seen issues with running multiple servers on a single box, if that box is powerfull enough ofcourse.