Subject: Unify Performance Issues are Priority Number One
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 07:45:00 -0700 (PDT)

Most of you are aware that Unify experienced some major performance issues as 
we tried to close out the month of July.  Not to go into any details but 
there seemed to be a lot of smaller issues which when combined caused the 
issues we saw on Monday and to a lesser degree on Tuesday.  Almost all of the 
issues relate to the quirkiness of the current version of Sybase which is 
used for Unify's database.  Jeff Johnson and his team are putting together a 
plan that will address most of these issues and hopefully result in 
acceptable performance as we go through next bidweek and try to close for 
August.  The short term tactical plans include the following:

Enhancing certain programs which seem to have become resource hogs as the 
amount of data grows.
Test and hopefully migrate to the latest version of Sybase which will address 
some of the issues.  This may also require some hardware changes as to where 
we store certain data.  We will also need some user help in stress testing 
prior to moving to production.
Addressing with the users billing transactions that have never been finaled.  
I have been told that we still have transactions going back to Jan of 99 that 
have not been finaled or closed out.  This puts quite a load on the PMA and 
accrual process since it has to go back to those open transactions to see 
what if any action should be taken with these transactions.

Once these changes have been implemented and hopefully bought us a little 
time to absorb the tremendous growth we've been seeing via EOL  then we will 
focus on delivering more intermediate and longer term solutions.  These 
include the following:

Rewriting most of the code and moving to a 3 tier environment which will be 
much more scalable.
Moving off of Sybase and on to Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle.  It will be 
easier to move Microsoft SQL Server but we have to be sure it is the right 
solution in the long term.

Jeff will be following up with some of you to go over a much more detailed 
plan.  Needless to say that this is his groups highest priority and his best 
people are working on these efforts.  This will slow down major enhancement 
efforts such as enhancing the gas applications to handle hourly trades and 
nominations.  We will keep you informed as we start to roll out the tactical 
solutions.  In the mean time feel free to contact me at x-36858 or Jeff at 
x-39694 if you have any questions or require additional detail.  Thanks!  -  
Tommy