Individual Report Processing Speed Issues

Good Morning

Am hoping someone maybe able to help with a problem that we are experiencing.

We are finding SIMS to be extremely slow in generating individual reports. Last year academic year we were looking at about 20 minutes to generate tracking grids for 30 students, this year we are talking upwards of 50 minutes for the same number of students on the same template.

Obviously we have applied the latests updates and we are using a temporary server for SIMS. We are currently going through a major building project that means we cannot use our normal server room. However looking at the server we are peaking at about 70% CPU at times but not constantly. We are peaking at 10gb out of 14gb of RAM. The only bottleneck appears to be the Hard Drives.

Now I know we are not exactly a small school ~ 2500 students with each year group being on average 350 students. This particular template will take nearly 11 hours on the above timings to generate to a PDF collector before I actually start to print.

We have spoken to SIMS but to be honest they were not much help and kept saying "well you are a large school", I thought I would ask the community here to see if what we were experiencing was normal.

Thanks for any help / advice

Paul

St. Georges Academy
Sleaford
Lincolnshire

Could you post a bit more info about the drive setup and whether you've done any SQL tuning?

I'm assuming (with 10GB used) your database is comfortably held in RAM?

How does the spec between the normal SIMS server and the temp SIMS server differ?

We had the same issue. We haven't quite solved it, but one thing I found helped speed things up quite substantially was to reduce image sizes - the school logo was on every page of our reports, and upon closer inspection it was actually a vastly scaled down version of a very large original image. I simply created a new copy of the image scaled to the correct size and replaced the logo in the report with that one (it reduced the image size from around a 10mb BMP to just 50kb JPG).

What we ended up doing is leaving a machine to run the reports over night. We export them all to a folder on the local machine, then use a script to print them all when we're ready. Let me know if you're interested in that script and I'll dig it out for you.

There have been a number of threads that mention similar problems since recent updates but i don't think there was a definitive solution. There are also quite a few topics on here that have lots of good tools and references for looking at your server.
It might be worth recreating your report template, to see if that makes a difference, otherwise, most end up doing as @LosOjos suggested, the scripts are all here for that too.
Personally, we've not noticed any major degradation, the only issue was problems due to Office 2010.
Do you have Office installed on the server, can you try it there. Ideally use an older version like 2003 or 2007 to rule out any issues.
How big is your database mdf and ldf as it may be very large and slow things down..