Most environmental variables are difficult to control or modify. They include such things as:
- Whether TPump is running on a TPA-node, non-TPA node, or an external client
- The power of the client platform
- The size of the pipe (network or channel) between the client and the database
- The number of nodes and CPU power of the the database system
- The TPump client software version
- The Vantage software version.
Environmental variables become particularly important to consider when you are testing in one environment, and planning on moving a TPump into production in an entirely different environment. Performance expectations based on a set of TPump parameters that were optimized on a 1-node database test system, are unlikely to be entirely effective when moved to a 20-node production system with a more powerful client and wider network bandwidth. Some parameters settings will have to be rethought moving from test to production.