Is there a way that I can use the 100% of my network bandwidth with only one connection?

Question

I have a program that reads about a million of rows and group the rows; the client computer is not stressed at all, no more than 5% cpu usage and the network card is used at about 10% or less.

If in the same client machine I run four copies of the program the use grow at the same rate, with the four programs running, I get about 20% cpu usage and about 40% network usage. That makes me think that I can improve the performance using threads to read the information from the database. But I don't want to introduce this complexity if a configuration change could do the same.

Client: Windows 7, CSDK 3.50.TC7

Server: AIX 5.3, IBM Informix Dynamic Server Version 11.50.FC3

Answer 1

There are a few tweaks you can try, most notably setting the fetch buffer size. The environment variable FET_BUF_SIZE can be set to a value such as 32767. This may help you get closer to saturating the client and the network.

Multiple threads sharing a single connection will not help. Multiple threads using multiple connections might help - they'd each be running a separate query, of course.

If the client program is grouping the rows, we have to ask "why?". It is generally best to leave the server (DBMS) to do that. That said, if the server is compute bound and the client PC is wallowing in idle cycles, it may make sense to do the grunt work on the client instead of the server. Just make sure you minimize the data to be relayed over the network.