Performance & System Maintenance

[COBS Tech Support]

Poor network performance is suggestive of an issue with the physical network.

There are no "adjustments" as such that can be made to improve software performance. However, there are several environmental factors that can impact on performance.

Troubleshooting a network performance problem is difficult. Suggested items to review include -

1. Perform a simple realistic network test to see if there any obvious gross problems with the network.

For example, copy a file of around 700-1000MB onto the network drive. Time the copy from the network drive onto a local PC C drive. Then time how long it takes to copy it from the PC C drive to the server drive.

Note any significant differences in timings. If you find it takes, for example, 3 minutes in one direction but 45 minutes in the other direction, this may be indicative of issues with the network's router.

2. In some situations a common source of problems for any type of application that works with LAN based data, is the organisation of that data on the drive.

These steps should be executed:

a. Get the user in charge of administrating the software to execute a Database Maintenance operation. This will compress the database.

b. Remove any redundant files from the network drive that also stores the CAPITAL applications and data, i.e., archive back-up files, etc. Ensure that there is lots of free space on the drive.

c. Run a disk defrag on that drive.

d. Only after the drive has been defragged, copy the entire \CAPITAL folder to \CAPITAL.NEW

e. Rename \CAPITAL to \CAPITAL.OLD

f. Rename \CAPITAL.NEW to \CAPITAL

NOTE: Steps d-f will cause all files to be written close to each other on the drive. It is not sufficient to simply do a defrag, as two files that work in conjunction with each other may end up over many years to be located on opposite ends of a drive. This can kill performance if this happens, and a defrag by itself will not fix such a problem.

3. Server file performance.

Ensure that the file server is set to prioritize background services, not foreground apps.

It should have plenty of RAM and memory management should be set to be managed by Windows itself. I.e., ensure that virtual memory has not been set to an arbitrary lower than recommended value.

Note: the above settings are found in Control Panel, under System, Advanced.

Finally, another common problem s that a small C drive partition was created on a server just for the OS. But over time OS updates have reduced the size of the C drive and the C drive file system on the server has also become fragmented. This can hurt the performance of the file cache which is critical for running database applications efficiently.

A dedicated OS C drive needs lots of free space on the disk for disk cache and virtual memory. It should not be filled up primarily with just the OS software.

4. Network design

You can eliminate the network LAN bottleneck by giving users who require higher performance direct RDP access into a server session. RDP sessions always tend to outperform LAN connections.