[Opensource] SEC: UNCLASSIFIED - Urgent Help! Horrendous Expresso DBObject per formance problem.

[McAuliffe, Robert]

We're using Expresso DBObjects as our data access for our web based
application.  Because of the kind of application, in one web request, we are
making 4000 requests to expresso for data.  We need this to take under 1s
(approx under 250ns each).  These requests are all simple 'get this field
from the record with this key' type requests, and there are only 140 unique
accesses, so theoretically, caching should eliminate any performance
problems.  However, we're getting horrendous performance.

We setup a test class that hit expresso for a single field (of the same
record), based on the primary key 10000 times, and got an average response
of 4ms (startup costs were removed from the timings, and expresso was
'warmed up' with 2000 hits'.   This results in a total time of 16s for our
response, which is well above our 1s expectation.  We have caching enabled
('y' in the config file) and we have an entry in the DBObjLimit table that
gives ample room for entries, but this doesn't seem to improve the
performance enough (we got an initial 1/3 performance improvement through
this).
 
Is this an expected time (4ms for a cached retrieval), and has anyone else
had any experiences in this area/know of a solution?

Rob 

PS the database is in the other room, so network should be almost ideal.