WinForms desktop Application - 200+ concurrent users

[Marcus via DotNetMonster.com]

Can a WinForms desktop Application with an Oracle backend accommodate 200+
concurrent users?

Or is it just like Excel or Access as far as concurrent user limititations.

Thanks,
Marcus

 

[RobinS]

I don't know why that would be a problem. I had one with 50 concurrent
users and it was running against Access. (I know, all together now,
*gasp!*).

Are they all going to be updating or just viewing? If updating, it might
be hairy. If just viewing, it should be fine.

Check out ClickOnce for deployment, though, if you can. That's going to be
your biggest issue.

Robin S.

 

[Bryan Phillips]

You may want to consider moving your middle tier to a central server and
using .Net remoting or web services between the central server and the
WinForms clients.

 

[Andy]

Can a WinForms desktop Application with an Oracle backend accommodate 200+
concurrent users?

Or is it just like Excel or Access as far as concurrent user limititations.

Your forms app should be just fine, I'm sure Oracle will be fine as
well.

 

[PS]

Can a WinForms desktop Application with an Oracle backend accommodate 200+
concurrent users?

The platforms you are choosing WinForms / Oracle are not the deciding factor
here as both are capable of being used in applications with thousands of
users. The factors that will affect the scalability would be items like the
application design, database design and database/server horsepower. A badly
designed application might bog down with 20 users.

PS

 

[Richard Lewis Haggard]

It depends upon two things: how intensive the database operation is and how
often it is requested.

Oracle runs as unmanaged code. WinForms is managed code. The transition from
managed to unmanaged and back is a significant time sink. I ran a time test
last year on this and got unbelievably bad numbers - something in the order
of a 100 milliseconds to make a call from a WinForm to a DCOM server
function on a remote Windows 2003 server that did nothing except return.

Having said that, assuming that each of your users is using a dedicated copy
of your WinForms application and your Oracle database is being served by a
reasonable piece of iron and the database operations are not out of this
world intensive, then you shouldn't have any trouble for normal operations
of several hundred concurrent users.

 

[Andy]

It depends upon two things: how intensive the database operation is and how
often it is requested.

Oracle runs as unmanaged code. WinForms is managed code. The transition from
managed to unmanaged and back is a significant time sink. I ran a time test
last year on this and got unbelievably bad numbers - something in the order
of a 100 milliseconds to make a call from a WinForm to a DCOM server
function on a remote Windows 2003 server that did nothing except return.

Having said that, assuming that each of your users is using a dedicated copy
of your WinForms application and your Oracle database is being served by a
reasonable piece of iron and the database operations are not out of this
world intensive, then you shouldn't have any trouble for normal operations
of several hundred concurrent users.

Was this with the Oracle provider shipping with the framework, or with
the managed provider created by Oracle? If doing Oracle development,
I would use their provider rather than the one that ships with the
framework. I have heard the Oracle provider that ships with the
framework is very slow compared to the other one.