Performance Advice

[marckssg]

Hi,

I am working on site at a company who has purchased an off the shelf ERP system that distributes reports created in Crystal Reports XI, and I believe is based around the XI release of RAS. The reports are viewed in the Active X viewer.

Recently the company has had a massive upgrade in the hardware the report distribution tool is running from. It has moved from a virtual server with 4gb of ram to its own blade with 36gb of ram and dedicated processors.

In testing we haven't noticed much, if anything of a performance increase, which was expected especially as the new environment is only in test with limited numbers of users.

For one particular report the stats read;
Run in Crystal directly on the old server 4 minutes to 4 minutes 30 seconds.
Run on the old server through Active X 17 to 20 minutes.
Run in Crystal directly on the new server 90 seconds is the slowest run time to date.
Run on the new server through Active X 17 minutes plus.

One reason given by the support company is that the Active X viewer needs to compile all the pages before the report is viewed were in Crystal each page is rendered as it is viewed.

I've tried to slow down the Crystal Report when run on the server by adding "special fields" such as page n of m and total page count, and this does indeed slow down the report but only to 2 to 3 minutes.

Is there anything else I can do in the report to help replicate the work that is occuring when the report is viewed through Active X?

I am facing an uphill battle to try and convince the support company that the problem is partly down to not utilising the full resouces on the box.

They are very keen to focus on one report when in fact no reports have shown an increase in performance, yet this one was mentioned early on as an example as its one of the longer running reports and always will be.

I've probably missed something off report distribution is not really my bag. However, if you can help and need more info let me know.


Cheers

Marc

 

[IdoMillet]

What Crystal Designer version were the reports created with? What Crystal version for the runtime components?
Fat client application or web application?

- Ido




view, email, export, burst, distribute, and schedule Crystal Reports.

http://www.MilletSoftware.com

 

[marckssg]

Hi Ido,

Reports created in Crystal XI.

I believe the RAS version to be XI.

Reports delivered via a web application sitting on its own server.

Cheers

Marc

 

[Turkbear]

Hi
On ethig I found about the ActiveX viewer that may explain :

One reason given by the support company is that the Active X viewer needs to compile all the pages before the report is viewed were in Crystal each page is rendered as it is viewed

If you have a Page x of n special formula on the first page ( Like most reports of more than one page have) , all pages must load before the first page is shown ( so the formula can be resolved, the total number of pages must be known )

If you have that type of formula, delete it a try again..





To Paraphrase:"The Help you get is proportional to the Help you give.."

 

[marckssg]

Hi Turkbear,

No the published report does not contain any special fields such as page n of m. However the company I am dealing with maintain that the Active X viewer still has to render every page before the first page is displayed.

I added page n of m to a version of the report I was running in the designer directly on the server to try and hinder performance, this only added around 30 seconds. Meaning the version viewed in Active X is still a good 15 minutes plus slower.

They are now telling me the RAS can only see 4gb of ram, so whilst you can have multiple instances of the RAS on one server, the performance will never get any better for one individual report. I'm trying to verify this, as I said earlier, the RAS really isn't my bag.

Cheers

Marc