Performance Issues 3

[andersonch]

We are currently running the following setup.

Great Plains Version 8.0 SP1 with Anyview, Etho Series.
45 Concurrent users
600-900 order per day with about 5000-10000 line items.
Sales Order, Financial, HR modules installed

(Database Server)
SQL Database / Process Server (Well, we would us it but MBS has to fix it first) on a ML570 Quad xeon 1.5 with 8GB of Ram.

(Clients)
We are not using Citrix / Terminal Services. Each PC has an installation of GP running. Our low end box is an HP EVO 510 2.4Ghz with 512Mb Ram. All users are located a the home office.

We are getting killed with performance problems, lockups, slow response when printing. We are now in the process of building a new database server using the "high-end hardware" setup requirements listed in the GP 8 update documentation.

Anyone had trouble like this before? Any ideas that we could look into to resolve the issue?

Thank you in advance.

 

[Dukester0122]

Try testing some users in Microsoft Remote Desktop(RDP) and see if this will make performance better.

 

[triad66]

Have you done performance monitoring to see what's happening at different times?

Sounds like your current server should be able to handle the normal traffic. Are other apps O.K.?

 

[andersonch]

Dukester0122, do you mean we should try using Microsoft terminal services? Have you had success using it?

triad66, we have been monitoring the problem but we haven't found the smoking gun yet. No problems with any other apps.

I submitted this post to see if there was a known issue that was affecting other companies, but I guess not. What would be nice to know is what other companies are using for there infrastructure. For example.

Server specs
Client specs
Number of concurrent users
Any third party modules (i.e. Ethoseries)
How many transactions a day
Any other important info

Are initial installation wasn't done properly (our former MBS provider) so now we are playing catch up. We haven't found a GP user in the area that runs as many transactions as we do so we are having a hard time coming up with a good setup.

Thanks to everyone for the help.

 

[Luvsql]

I don't believe upgrading your sql server will do the trick. We run 60 users across 5 load-balanced citrix servers (each are dual 1.4Ghz with 2Gb of RAM). We have performance issues and don't even come close to the amount of data entry that you have. Our GP installs could be hanging and the server shows not a blip in the CPU. We noticed a huge problem with project accounting where it would take a user 2 full minutes just to open one window when receiving a PO. Microsoft admitted to an issue with their code. It was using local temp tables on the citrix servers instead of sending its queries to sql via sps.

GP is still the original code that was written for Ctree, which they updated to work in a sql environment, but not optimized for a sql environment. I don't see any real fix in performance until the re-write.

One thing we installed on our citrix servers was uniprint. We found all reports in GP when printed to the screen when on citrix, hanging when viewing and taking a while to print. All GP reports are graphical. If you view the size of the print jobs you'll see that a small report is actually over 5Mb in size. Uniprint compresses the report into pdf file and send that to the local PC (not citrix) printer and then prints it.

If you do find some sort of solution for performance on citrix, I'd love to hear it!

 

[Dukester0122]

We use Terminal Services for local users which is around 30 users while our remote users uses Citrix NFuse. We have around 300-400 daily orders in 16 sites excluding ones from our e-commerce and EDI systems. Financials, Distribution, Manufacturing,FRx, Anyview,Etho Series,etc. installed. We're using a DL380 dual-processor with 4gb of ram for our SQL Server and 3 databases including our production database which is 18gb. Our Terminal and Citrix server are on DL360 PIII 1.6 and 2gb ram, been running since 2002 without problems. We've moved one server from Citrix to Terminal server without problems.

 

[dcoulson]

I don't know if you are still having the problems. We have about 70 concurrent users spread between two companies that are hitting the same server. Both places are using Financials, Distribution, Manufacturing, FRx, Anyview, EthoSeries, and a bunch more. We have not had bad performance issues except occasionally some have had slow printing problems. We do not operate on a Citrix environment, so updates are a pain in the neck, but performance is better. The server is a Dual AMD 2800 Processor with 4GB of ram. Our disk arrays are Cheetah 18,000 RPM hot swaps. We are also in the process of upgrading our ethernet to gigabit, more for our CAD drawings than GP. The workstations are AMD 3200 @ 2.19 Ghz and 2 GB of ram.

I do not know exactly how many transactions we do in a day, but it is quite a few because of the Manufacturing. The only time we get some strain on the server is when we try to do a Standard Cost Roll-up during the day, then it takes a couple of seconds for response, otherwise it is generally less than a second.

When setting up our server, we did not follow Great Plains advice. We went to a book about optimizing SQL servers. I don't have the book with me at the moment, but when our VAR came in to do the install, they were very surprised at how fast things went.