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Performance improvementsMany people experience performance problems with Sage Line 50. Especially with large files. You will not get great performance out of Sage on a Network. There are quite a few things that can cause poor performance and there are several tweaks that can improve things.
If you find a tweek we don't list, please let us know. using the feedback form on the left hand side of this page. You might be able to get more help in our Line 50 forum Even with relatively small files Line 50 can perform badly if there are networking issues. There is no way we could possibly list all the issues that may effect network performance however, here are the general issues and some ways to resolve them. Poor bandwidth. If your network is faulty and data can not transfer quickly then you will get performance problems on a 10 MegaBit network you should be able to copy data at more than 800KiloBytes per second eg an 8MB file should take less than 10 seconds to copy from one machine to another. 100Mb is the bare minimum speed for getting a reasonable performance. The cost of upgrading to gigabit networking is relativly small and Line 50 is a heavy network user so it is worth doing (indeed gigabit is now the recommended infrastructure). High Latency. Sage asks for data based on information in data it has just received. If you can transfer data at high speed you may still have high latency and this will slow performance. You can find out the latency by pinging between two machines whilst transferring a lot of data. High latency is cause by lack of bandwidth, the only move is to upgrade networking. To talk to another machine you computer need to know the IP address of the other machine. If you do not have a DHCP server, we suggest that you use fixed IPs and set up hosts and lmhosts files in the windows system32 directory. Multiple Protocols. If you have more than one protocol on your network then bandwidth is wasted. We recommend using only one protocol (eg. TCP/IP). the more modern your operating system the more memory you need, installing an upgrade will improve performance and will not cost much. More RAM the better, if you want to DIY, be careful installing it and take precautions against ESD if in doubt call in someone who knows what they are doing. When machines get short of memory they copy the contents of memory to hard disk, this is slowed down if you have a slow hard disk, hard disks can be slower if they share a controller with another device such as a CD an extra IDE cable will enable you to put the CD on a separate controller and improve performance for a few pounds. Disk fragmentation is where the files get broken up into lots of little pieces and stored all over the drive, the drive has to move back and forth across the surface of the disk to get all the data and this slows it down. You can reorganise the data on the disk with the disk defragmenter found by going start>programs>accessories>system tools>disk defragmenter. Modern SATA drives do not suffer these issue as much. Download and install the latest drivers for your network card. The best way to improve performance if data is on a windows server, is to turn on server side reporting. To use this you must have TCP/IP protocol and we recommend no other protocols. To turn on server side reporting on the server. In line 50 go to Tools>Options>Environment Tick the box marked enable server side reporting Type the name of the server in box labelled server. (This is the name of the machine on the network) Press ok. Go back to Tools>Options>Environment and un-tick the box marked enable server side reporting. Press ok Go to the Line 50 program directory, locate the file sgrepsvr.exe Right click on it (hold the right click) drag it to the start button and then programs and then startup (release the right click) choose create shortcut In future server side reporting should automatically start with the machine. To start it manually just click on it in the startup section. You should see a little icon appear in the system tray (Bottom right by the clock) Turn on Server Side reporting on the clients You need to do this on each client. In line 50 go to Tools>Options>Environment Tick the box marked enable server side reporting Type the name of the server in box labelled server. Run a test report. The only way to reduce the size of data files is to remove data from the system. If you have stock codes, account code, old stock records and old invoices that are no longer required then removing them will reduce the size of the files and improve performance. Delete Customer Accounts Delete Supplier Accounts Delete Nominal Accounts Delete Product Records Remove Stock History Make sure you have followed year end procedures properly and that all un needed transactions have been removed. Year end
Providing you have done all these your audit trail should not have any retained transactions other than.
Locate the Sage.ini file (in windows or winnt directory) Open it in notepad In your antivirus program set an exclusion for real time (Auto Protect) checking to exclude the sage data files, either by giving the path to your accdata directory or by excluding all Sage data files with *.dta You do not normally need a firewall inside a protected network. Exclude the local area network from your firewall, or better still us a hardware firewall on your internet connection and switch off all internal / windows firewalls and don't use dial up. Check opportunistic Locking (oplocks) the following link explains it all in great detail. Please note: this involves making changes to the registry, please backup before you do this, if you are unsure, call on a qualified person to do it for you, damaging the registry can may your system completely useless. (Note: this information comes from the open source community, Samba server on Linux pretending to be windows appears to outperform windows in our tests) http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/locking.html#id2584291 Make sure you have the latest patches installed for your version from the sage website. http://www.sage.co.uk/updates/Line50.aspx
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