Speeding up Multi User

[chris ashdown]

We operate 7 users on a mixture of 1-3 year old XP-Pro workstations and a 1 year top spec server holding the database and 1 gig network. dual core workstations

As we are at the maximum number of users for Access database and sync and cannot afford upgrade to Enterprise, I am checking what could be achieved by upgrading the workstations

The biggest problem seems to be changing between sites and although the newer workstations are slightly quicker it's not enough to justify all new ones

Does anyone have an practical knowledge of speed increase of workstations by updating workstation processors say to the latest high spec, I understand there must be a increase but is it noticable and worth the money

Is there much difference between 9.0.5 an 10.2 we are still on 9.0.5

Did the 10.2 solve the multi uk address i.e. England, IOW, Scotland, Offshore islands etc with sagepay or is it still a problem and does it affect actinic pay as well

[Duncan Rounding]

Thinking out loud without thought to licensing - if you upgraded half of your sites to v10 and left the others on v9 you could perhaps run two instances of Actinic on each workstation thus eliminating some of the time taken swapping between sites.

[chris ashdown]

I dont think the number of sites slowes it down just the number of users and swopping between sites

[Jan]

Hi Chris,

What do you generally do with the sites - perhaps you could streamline your order processing to make it so that less people need to be logged in at any one time.

Regards,

[chris ashdown]

Hi Jan

We do run with as many switched off as possible but have 2 x telesales, 1 x dispatch, 1 x purchase and quite often myself and accounts and back orders

Whilst we expect the main site to be slow with everyone normally accesing the server database, it appears the workstations changing sites is a big problem, which seems to indicate the workstation speed, but when run on their own with a couple of sites in mu format and database on same workstation the changing speed is far better

Quite honestly there does not seem much difference between the fast / newest workstation and the slowest / oldest workstation

[Jan]

I think the delay on startup is caused by cached data being loaded, and so network speed may be more relevant that PC speed, I think that different user types load different types of data, it might be worth trying logging in as order processors or content managers and seeing if that helps.

Regards,

[plantsforshade]

I notice Actinic are now saying up to 4 users for the Access version, 4 users plus need to go to the sql database (enterprise).

Nigel

[chris ashdown]

Four I think is playing safe but agreed we know we are at the limit, but it's a megga jump in prices to enterprise for both software and support, we are talking a major price for our setup and also possible upgrade from MSServer 2003:(

[fergusw]

Did the 10.2 solve the multi uk address i.e. England, IOW, Scotland, Offshore islands etc with sagepay or is it still a problem and does it affect actinic pay as well

Chris,
this will be fixed in 10.0.3.
See our post on this here (http://www.teclan.com/blog/?p=276) (Note the updates at the bottom!). There is also a temporary fix to the state drop-down issue found in the V10 checkout as well.

[malbro]

Quite honestly there does not seem much difference between the fast / newest workstation and the slowest / oldest workstation which confirms that the most likely bottleneck is the network/server/access database.

Is the server looking after anything else or just hosting the Actinic database, other things to check are the server network connection and the network links.

With up to seven users I would look at 1Gb network links using switches rather than hubs, switches can give twice the throughput with the right network cables and network cards in the PC's, and those other users may not be connected to Actinic but they may be using bandwidth.

1Gb networks require all 8 cores to be connected, some older network cables only have four cores connected (look at the connector on the cable you can often see how many cores are connected) so the network actually degrades to 100Mb.

If you are using hubs rather than switches the network will slow down as hubs broadcast to all connected PC's instead of routing messages just to the PC's involved. With a mix of old and new workstations this will slow down a network based on hubs to the speed of the slowest PC. With switches the PC's can often run in duplex mode effectively doubling the the speed and it isolates the slow PC's from the faster ones allowing maximum throughput.

Finally the server needs to have a good high speed network connection with a high grade network card as it is dealing with all seven workstations and is therefore a potential bottleneck. Give it plenty of ram to work with, as much as you can afford up to the limit for the operating system.


Sorry to be so techie :D

[chris ashdown]

Hi

Yes all run on Gig bit system, switches and cat 6 cables, server exit processor with 3 gig and only other job is mail

[Donna Kempster]

We have 4 sites with about 200 products each. Switching to a different site used to take a couple of minutes. Now it takes 10 seconds!!

We took the following steps to speed up the networking on the XP Pro SP2 PC holding the actinic sites.

1. In the control pannel property settings of our network card we turned off the power saving modes so the card runs constantly at 1Gig.

2. We noticed the following warning occuring in the system Event Log;
"TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts." On further reading online we learned that this limit is set to 5 connections in XP and 10 connections in XP pro. We used a tool which patched a couple of system files to allow the value of 50 connections.

We read about it here;
http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1246416&page=1

The patch tool is here;
http://www.lvllord.de/?lang=en&url=downloads#4226patch

Please post your results and if you think this is a wise move.

Thanks.