Q:
Topic thread:
Printer Systems (PRINT)
PSF/AIX
I have a user who wishes to use PSF/AIX as a conversion engine to take
Postscript documents and convert to AFP files. These then would be
uploaded to the host. Each Postscript document would be about 4 to 6
pages and there will be up to 1000 conversions done a day. They are
contemplating doing the conversion on a J40 (4-way,256 Mb) that already
has FileNet running on it. They've asked me for some guidance in terms
of the system requirements for their volume of conversions. They are
also wondering how long each conversion will take. Can you help?
Thanks.
A:
Unfortunately, PostScript is one of those datastreams for which it's
nearly impossible to predict performance in advance. Boulder has not
been able to find any objective external characteristics that serve as
accurate predictors. The recommendation from the Boulder performance
analyst is to do a benchmark if at all possible. Having said that,
there's not yet a group in Boulder who has the responsibility for doing
customer benchmarks (though that may change at some pointin the
future -- stay tuned).
Absent a benchmark, sometimes the PRTSAMP people can help by running
a representative job on the PSF/AIX system they have here and telling
you how it performs on that specific configuration; then the best you
can do is try to extrapolate to your desired configuration based on
published benchmarks (such as the Relative OLTP). Or the Boulder
performance analyst may be willing to look at a representative page
and try to estimate what he thinks performance might be.
This is all very fuzzy, I know, but the difficulty of PostScript jobs
vary widely, and there's just no single predictor we can guesstimate
from. It is a fact that the PostScript transform will take as much
of the CPU as it can while the transform is underway; thus any decision
to run it on a system with other applications should be very carefully
considered.
If you want the performance analyst to take a look at some
representative pages, let me know.
S e a r c h - k e y w o r d s:
psf/6000 psf/aix psf aix postscript performance sizing ps2afp upload
transform
WWQA: ITEM: RTA000147620 ITEM: RTA000147620
Dated: 08/1998 Category: XPSF6000
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