Thanks to all who answered.
I get the main point: Discard this "grand-mother's computer" and get a useful one.
I'm trying to get at least a 2 processor Xeon computer with 2 Gb RAM for the
test environment and with 3 or 4 Gb for the production environment.
Up to there the opinions are clear and uniform.
On the other side, the shared vs dedicated thing has different opinions (in
some of them I'm not sure if they are related to the poor equipment or to the
kind of DB usage).
So I would like to re-ask your opinion supposing I get a computer with that
new configuration for the test environment where the load would be of about 10
users (I imagine between 80 and 100 processes).
I believe (may be wrong) that there may be some threshold in the equation of
processor type, available RAM, amount of processes, etc, where one mode starts
to be preferrable over the other (prior to tuning tasks). But this is surely
not easy to tell beyond the experience -which I don't have much related to
shared server mode.
Or is this a silly question?
Thanks again, and excuse me if this is not a proper question.

--Claudio



On Tue, 30 Jan 2007 10:53:13 -0300, Claudio Alonso -Oracle DBA wrote
> My client is a CRM application provider who usually installs their application
> running with MS SQL Server. This time thy have a client that is
> willing to use Oracle, so I'd believe the performance should be much
> better than usual, but it's not the case. They did their best
> without an Oracle DBA, following external instructions from partners
> via email. The situation is kind of critical right now because the
> performance is not good and the project is in danger, so they asked
> for my help. So I'm starting to work with this database (Oracle
> running on a Windows environment) behind a CRM application with
> 20/30 users. The application usually opens 6 to 10 database
> connections for each user, so the amount of connections is normally
> about 200. Most of the time the application is processing
> transactions, but it's usual to see several times a day big reports
> being run by the supervisors. The performance is not good and the
> database is running on a 1 Gb RAM Pentium IV, configured to work
> with shared server processes (I believe it's a mistake though I
> don't have much experience in shared server mode so I might be wrong)
> . Do you think that a database with these characteristics should be
> in a P-IV with 1 Gb of RAM running in shared server mode, or it
> would be better to change it to a dedicated server environment
> (and/or may be add some RAM). At the same time, what is the minimal
> ammount of RAM that you recommend for such a thing? My customer's
> customer is about to run a test on a separated server, so I'm
> building a new environment from scratch. The additional problem is
> that the test server has only 256 Mb of RAM (is it me, or are they shooting
> to kill?).
> I hope you can give me some advice.
> Thanks in advance,
>
> --Claudio
>
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