PC Power Survey; Where is the Constraint?

[WondersWhy]

Hi,
I am in the process of developing an Impromptu Report that includes several sub-reports, charts and drill through capabilities. It is kind of a central business "health monitor" that shows summaries of quote activity, bookings, sales activities for the last 5 years, and more detailed information on the last 30 days and well... further details on the report do not matter for this question so let's just say it's getting BIG and I am having performance problems.

I am about a third done with this new report, but have noticed that already, each time it runs on my PC, it takes about two and a half minutes to run. I have published my work in process with Impromptu Web, and with the compilation happening right on the server, it takes about 40 seconds to run.

Once I am done with the other 2/3 of this project, the report will probably take over 5 minutes to compile. I can't handle sitting here waiting and watching my screen half of the day!!!

I am using a 450 mHz processor with 384 mb on my PC, running Windows 95. On the server, we have an 800 mHz processor with SCSI drives and 1 Gig of memory running NT. I do not know the bus speed of either right now, but can probably find this detail. There can be no doubt that the server's bus is clicking along faster than my PC's.

I am trying to identify where my hardware constraints are. I suspect that it is in my PC's processor. I use an AMD Athalon 1.8 Ghz with XP at home which can pretty much blow away my old 450 machine here at work. I have not had the opportunity to install Impromptu at home and log in with a VPN. So far, I have not received permission to try this experiment.

So... It is time to upgrade my PC, but before I do, I would like to know from other Impromptu users. What are you using? Have you upgraded recently? What type of system did you upgrade to? Can you describe the performance increase? Also... has anyone experimented with the difference between normal RAM and Rambus memory? I suspect that there might be a potential for quite a performance boost with Rambus, but I am not sure.

One more thing... Is anyone running Impromptu 6.0.6 or 7.0 on XP? I have 7.0 in a box and will install that next month. Right now I am using 6.0.6

Thanks to all for your feedback!
Tony T. in Minneapolis

 

[griffindm]

Are you running your reports directly from OLTP data sources, or from aggreagated reporting tables? I often deal with slow report performance by creating a stored procedure to aggregate and summarize the report data into a simpler structure. This is especially true if the report only had to show a small number of aggregated rows. You can still drill into detail on demand, but you can greatly speed the run time of the original report. Also you can create indices that are geared specifically to the filters and grouping of the reports and sub-reports. If you're willing to do a little homework in learning how to do this it can pay great dividends in the quality of your reports.

Regards,

Dave Griffin