The days of agonizing over how to spend your limited hardware budget in order to get acceptable performance are pretty much over. Modern computers are so powerful and so fast that all A-Shell applications, with very few exceptions, will run at nearly unbelievable speeds. However, there are still some basic principles to consider when deciding on how to deploy and configure a multi-user system for best performance:
Operating System
Linux is generally much faster than Windows, especially in the area of multi-user disk I/O. It also requires a lot less memory per user. At the opposite extreme is the Windows peer-to-peer ("P2P") LAN environment, where file sharing can get bogged down in network communication between multiple PCs. If you don't have a lot of disk I/O involving simultaneous access to shared files, a P2P LAN is probably the simplest and most familiar Windows configuration, especially for those who already have such a LAN in place. Somewhere in the middle would be a Windows server configuration where the workstations are just running as terminals (i.e. connected via RDP or ATE/telnet), in which case you eliminate the network/file sharing overhead.
CPU
For multi-user systems, the more CPU cores, the better. A-Shell applications are rarely limited in speed by CPU issues, so this isn't a major consideration.
Memory
Most A-Shell applications are quite comfortable with less than 20MB per user, which is quite small by modern standards. That said, all operating systems will benefit from lots of extra memory for disk cache and other internal uses.
Disk Drives
SCSI is far faster than SATA or IDE, even in a virtual hardware environment. Since most A-Shell applications will be limited in speed by disk access times rather than CPU performance, this is probably one of the most important considerations. On the other hand, most modern disk drives are very fast, especially SSDs.
Directories
An often overlooked consideration is how many files you allow to accumulate in a single directory. With huge disk capacities, you may be tempted to accumulate years worth of report files. However, a better approach is to move those files to archive directories so the active directories don't have to deal with overhead of scanning over thousands of files for every file lookup. A good rule of thumb is to keep the number of files in any active directory below 1000.
More Information
Given the pace of change in the computer hardware environment, the information presented above may be accurate or hopelessly out of date. For more information and the latest discussions on this subject, see the relevant discussions on the A-Shell forum.
