Eclipse .Net response times

[pete]

Would anyone mind timing how long it takes to:

1) Load the initial Searchstar page
2) Login and load the management page
3) Search for a book by title
4) Access the book details by double-clicking

For bonus points, could you also test Searchstar in Firefox 3.5 or greater and see if the layout is broken? (list of books with text mashed together).

This post brought to you by "Wait, we've stuck the thing on a Sun Fire X4150 and it's still performingly poorly?". It's not thrashing disk, cpu, network or memory and it's just as slow as it was when running on Core2 hardware.

[interele]

With FF 3.5.4 the seach does scrunge up the words

[DrPerceptron]

3 seconds
10 seconds
5 seconds
8 seconds

The bulk of our problems are down to adding books etc and actually opening the library client - both of which can take anywhere between 10 seconds and more commonly over 30 seconds...

Virus Scanners made quite a difference to it too...

[maniac]

1) about 2-3 seconds
2) about 2-3 seconds (no login required as it's authenticating against AD)
3) 5 - 10 seconds depending on search
4) about 2-3 seconds

Our eclipse system is running on a 2 year old duel core server. last year it was on a server that was built from bits of other old servers - it ran, but quite slowly.

Not got FF installed so can't test the search I'm afraid!

Mike.

[pete]

*resurrects thread*
Are you running SQL Express or full server?

The release notes for 9.5 have a disclaimer "Please note that if you choose to use SQL Server 2005 Express you may experience some speed issues. Also, Express should not be shared with other applications and can only use a single processor."

But I have a bunch of much heavier applications with 4-500 clients regularly accessing them on SQL Express 2005 instances and they move like a greased whippet and so I'm reluctant to spend £700~ on a SQL2008 licence for a library database, when I have no guarantees performance will improve.

[Iain.Faulkner]

We've been having similar issues, however we reported it to Eclipse and they've managed to resolve it, however I've no idea what they did I'm afraid :-(

But well worth raising it directly with them.

[pete]

We've been having similar issues, however we reported it to Eclipse and they've managed to resolve it, however I've no idea what they did I'm afraid :-(

But well worth raising it directly with them.

The problem is, I have no idea what "acceptable performance" is. I get:

Searchstar initial load - 6 seconds
Admin login - 3 seconds
Search for a book - average of 3-5 seconds (cheese/green/red/blue/yellow as generic search terms)
load book details - 2-3 seconds

Which is within what everyone else is getting, but for what it's actually doing (basic database lookups) in those tests, I think it's taking too long.

We're already in a long-running argument with the vendor about our experiences. Other local schools are experiencing similar issues and even when the vendor comes to a user group meeting for a demo, their laptop demo version is (reportedly - our Librarian went to it) also slow.

Heritage are currently trying to pinch our business back with low, low prices and free trials. Bearing in mind we previously used heritage for about a decade without issue, we're looking at the offer very thoughtfully.

[maniac]

. . . . . but for what it's actually doing (basic database lookups) in those tests, I think it's taking too long.

We're already in a long-running argument with the vendor about our experiences. Other local schools are experiencing similar issues and even when the vendor comes to a user group meeting for a demo, their laptop demo version is (reportedly - our Librarian went to it) also slow.

It's not the database lookups that are slow, I think it's the page generation that takes the time because it's a very feature rich interface with a lot of Javascript and other such things in it, it takes a while for their engine to parse the script, and a while for the client to load it. I've found the client performance has just as bigger impact on the speed it works at as the server does.

Personally I really like Eclipse.net, it works very well for us, our LRC manager likes it as well, and the kids do to, so it's a win all round for us. I've also found their support to be pretty good on the few occassions I've had to call them, they were very helpful when we migrated it from the old server to the new one last summer.

Don't get me wrong, the product, like every other piece of software, is not without its flaws and faults, but all in all I don't think it's that bad.

Mike.

[pete]

It's not the database lookups that are slow, I think it's the page generation that takes the time because it's a very feature rich interface with a lot of Javascript and other such things in it, it takes a while for their engine to parse the script, and a while for the client to load it. I've found the client performance has just as bigger impact on the speed it works at as the server does.
Mike.

You're right - searching for a single book and saving the resulting generated page, I get 1.3MB of files.

940KB of which is javascript & .axd
345.2KB for the main .html file
Remainder being images, css and a few .html files.

[browolf]

our eclipse has mysteriously gone slow today. it seems to be any page that has supportfiles.microlib.co.uk lookups on. ironically today is an inset day and the internet is a lot faster than normal. (i got 1.5mb/s from symantec earlier) host file 127.0.0.1 trickery as per their instructions has made the problem "go away" but it would appear the problem might be at the eclipse hq end.....

this kind of thing happen often?