Mystery laptop

I had no clue how good my laptop was. Seriously. Today it kicked ass of an 8-processor server.

Tomorrow we have a go-live of a Microsoft Dynamics NAV deployment, with manufacturing customized to support configure-to-order functionality. Refreshing manufacturing orders now calculates dynamic BOMs and routings, and it takes time.

This is my laptop:

HP Compaq 6910p
Intel Core2 Duo, 2.40 GHz
4 GB RAM
Windows Vista Enterprise, 64-bit
SQL Server 2005 Developer, 64-bit
Lousy single 5400 RPM SATA drive (heavily fragmented, with SQL data and log files obviously residing on the same volume)

This is the server:

HP ProLiant (don’t know the exact model)
Intel Xeon MP 3,16 GHz (eight of these in total)
16 GB RAM
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise R2, 64-bit
SQL Server 2005 Enterprise, 64-bit
Three SCSI disks in RAID 0+1 (with SQL data and log files residing on separate logical volumes)

While testing the manufacturing order refreshing, we noticed somewhat slow performance on server – it takes about 15 seconds to refresh one. I took the database backup, restored it locally on my laptop, ran the refresh of the same manufacturing order, and it completed in 6 seconds. Repeatedly.

I was sure something was wrong, so I established another test database on the server, restored the backup in order to get the same environment (the same freshly restored database), and still, it took 15 seconds to refresh a manufacturing order. I killed all connections, made sure nobody but me was accessing the database, and still no improvement. It was not a locking issue. And it shouldn’t have anything to do with SIFT tables, indexes or anything – the same backup was restored on my laptop and on the server, and the 8-processor server still eats my laptop’s dust.

I didn’t have much time to investigate into this further, but I see where most of my effort will go tomorrow. I have no clue what’s going on, but there is no logical explanation how my laptop, any laptop, could possilby outperform this server.

Any suggestions, anyone?

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