[sims] Spring release + Server 2003 = Slow

[Rawns]

We have one school that have had all the patches and the CPU is still just maxing out at 100% and not letting up!

[barjoysee]

Just done the spring update last night our old server (Server 2003 R2/dual core/4Gb Ram - upgrading in summer) is struggling but closing Solus 3 helped free a bit of resources ! Think we need the old home page bringing back ! Will do a reboot tonight and see if it speeds things a little.

 

http://i41.tinypic.com/33kympf.jpg

 

Just wanted to say since popping on Patch 18180 and doing a reboot things are looking a lot more healthy:

 

http://i41.tinypic.com/53k2hl.jpg

 

also just done 18113 for attendance and 18169 for course manager just waiting on feedback to see if they have worked...busy time with patches !

[vikpaw]

So glad we don't have the CPU issue. Management would go mental considering other things going wrong.

[splattthecat]

We have one school that have had all the patches and the CPU is still just maxing out at 100% and not letting up!

 

2 schools in Somerset now with performance issues despite both being patched with 18180. Achievement Summary and Behaviour summary homepage widgets seem to be the main culprits, and we have requested the schools to investigate how these are being used and what refresh rates are set.

[Rawns]

Just wanted to say since popping on Patch 18180 and doing a reboot things are looking a lot more healthy:

 

http://i41.tinypic.com/53k2hl.jpg

 

also just done 18113 for attendance and 18169 for course manager just waiting on feedback to see if they have worked...busy time with patches !

 

It does looks better then the first screen grab, but looking at your CPU graph, it still appears to be spiking a fair old amount!

[PhilNeal]

Probably unfair to say, cos who knows whether they increment through the numbers one by one or release each one, but when you look at patch # 18180 released, what was it Monday this week?, and then see today or perhaps it was late yesterday, # 18205, a layman could conclude they have had to patch 25 different product issues in that space of time. Worrying? :-)

 

We have one numbering system for all issues. Any school that requires an individual fix for one reason or another increments the number and +22,000 schools use the software daily.

 

I believe that the schools that had performance issues now have fixes. Looking at postings here and on SupportNet it looks as if the CPU usage is not as low as it was before but is manageable and I have taken this up with the development team. There is some front end work (that can't be patched) which will be included in the summer release to address that issue.

 

I recognise that this issue has caused some schools a lot of pain and very much regret that.

[vikpaw]

I often wonder similarly with regards to supportnet case numbers, they seem to go up loads. I had 2 cases in April, 11 days apart but the number difference was close to 2 million. That's like 3 cases per school per day! Internal cases must be logged using the same system.

[Rawns]

I'd be interested to know how many operators Capita have on their first line support desk! Must be thousands!!!!

[CyberNerd]

I'd be interested to know how many operators Capita have on their first line support desk! Must be thousands!!!!

 

It's not close to the 22,000 beta testers they have!

[Edu-IT]

18113 and 18169.

 

Any specifics on those patches, and what they do?

[vikpaw]

18113 and 18169.

 

Any specifics on those patches, and what they do?

 

18113 fixes a fault with the built-in Attendance report - Today's Register Report. It was showing duplicate staff, multiple times, there is a thread about it. The patch adds a distinct clause in the SQL to bring back one set of data per teacher. I've applied it and it fixes the issue. This is a common report used for FireDrill purposes so is important.

 

18169 fixes this issue "End dates on Classes in Course Manager are incorrect after an export from Nova-T6" - i have experienced the problem as some of our reports are done on course marksheets only, and on fake courses where the memberships are made up of e.g. reg groups to bring the whole year in. We found the membership dates were random and split. I manually fixed, so haven't applied this patch.

 

Good job you mentioned it though because the course dates are being messed up after every send back of the tt from Nova !! GRR and i've made a host of changes in the past two weeks! i guess i need to request it if it's not already on SOLUS

[Sheridan]

Is the high CPU useage mainly down to the refresh of the timeline? I've just deployed Spring 2013 and its too soon to tell the impact on CPU usage. Is there not a way to set users default refresh to a higher value?

[vikpaw]

Is the high CPU useage mainly down to the refresh of the timeline? I've just deployed Spring 2013 and its too soon to tell the impact on CPU usage. Is there not a way to set users default refresh to a higher value?

 

That's what the first interim patch did. Subsequent ones fix the data calls to be more efficient.

[Sheridan]

Ah ok - I've deployed the 18205 patch straight after the Spring 2013 update so fingers crossed I've pre-empted the problem

[SHimmer45]

ran the upgrade on monday and so far havent come across any reported issues, CPU usage is basically ticking over on the server we have.

did apply the patches at time of install as well

[Rawns]

Warning: In case this affects other schools.

 

Just had a site that's had all of the latest patches and all was well, until they disabled the School Events option in the Home Page Time-line Configuration screen. After that, anyone with the time line on the homepage got kicked out of SIMS with the "Cannot find table 8." error (which was originally an issue with patch 18180 in some sites). We found a user without the time line who could log in and got them to re-enable the School Events option. After that, everyone could log back in again.

 

If you have had 18180 and did not get the Table 8 error, seems that you may actually have the issue and not realise it yet!

 

We will be logging a call with Capita about this!

 

 

Edit: To clarify, the school had patch 18180 and showed no issues. They've had it for over a week and changing this timeline setting has caused the error to show itself. Therefore it's safe to assume other schools could have the issue too but it is laying dormant.

Edited May 15, 2013 by Rawns

[tmcd35]

Just discovered this thread (a bit late!) as we are having the same unusable SIMS issue. I've contacted Capita but no word from them about patch availability yet. As this generally now been resolved for everyone here of is there still problems with patch 18180? I have half the school screaming at me at the mo because SIMS is barely useable, arrggghhhh!!!!

[Edu-IT]

We've got the latest patches on and no complaints about usage here.

[the_quick]

We have all teachers complaining about how sims is slow to load, since the new timetable it takes ages now.

[Rawns]

New news item posted by Jon Wood to clear up the confusion around the patches:

 

Spring - Performance issues patch summary

There has been some confusion over the patches so this news item is an attempt to clear it up - I hope the below helps.

 

If you are having performance issues due to the SIMS Homepage changes in Spring then you should 1st apply Patch 18205 which improves the Timeline performance. (Patch 18180 does the same performance work but could cause a problem stopping people from logging in so has been replaced, if you have applied it already but the school are not experiencing issues loging in then there is no need to apply Patch 18205 unless you disable the School Events option in the Homepage Timeline configuration screen as this will cause the login issues)

 

If you are still having performance issues then we would recommend applying Patch 18148 to increase the refresh on the Timeline to 30 minutes.

 

Patch 18170 increases the refresh rate to 2 hours and is designed to alleviate the pressure on the CPU for hosted sites but can be applied to any school if requested if they are still having issues.

 

Patch 18171 stops the auto refresh completely and should only be used if the above patches have not worked and the school are happy to disable this functionality.

 

If a site is having performance issues with the reporting engine and experiencing timeouts then they can choose to amend the connect.ini file to increase the CommandTimeout parameter as described earlier in this thread.

 

In addition there are generic approaches to improving performance on site

1) run the Truncate Log and re-index Patch (14265)

2) archive the attendance marks for historic years

 

If the site is still experiencing performance issues then please do escalate a case so it can be investigated further by our development team.

 

I would also like to re-assure you that we are working on further improvements to the performance in the Summer release of SIMS and if need be the Autumn release.

 

Apologies once again for the inconvenience this has caused.

 

Regards,

Jonathan Wood

SIMS Product Manager (Technical and Releases)

 

The SIMS Spring release has been a shocker!

[zag]

What a mess!

 

Hopefully this gets capita working on performance across the board on Sims, its quite bad all over.

[FN-GM]

For those having performance issues, try this. Delete the "My SIMS Documents" folder in you Documents folder (on client machines not server). Then reopen SIMS. It has helped a few performance issues here.

[the_quick]

Would that folder not re populate again and bring same issue back in few days.

 

So far my opinion of Capita is even lower than it was before. Only because they have monopoly they are still around, if the market would be more competitive, they would be long gone or we would have much better service.

[vikpaw]

Would that folder not re populate again and bring same issue back in few days.

 

So far my opinion of Capita is even lower than it was before. Only because they have monopoly they are still around, if the market would be more competitive, they would be long gone or we would have much better service.

 

Yeah, i can't see it doing much. the only issue that could fix is if the old folder had some old / corrupt files in and the system struggled to process them. It will get recreated on next login.

 

I've noticed some increase in CPU usage, not directly affecting anyone, but if i try to compress a backup during the day now, it maxes out at 100% and some users can't save, this was never a problem before.

[whitejames]

When will a patch be available I have staff that cannot update the registers and I keep getting faults and timeouts all the time the processing time is 80% and above most of the day. @PhilNeal who is best to speak to so we can get this resolved as I have ofsted coming in and the attendance staff and teachers need to get access to reports quickly and SIMS is just plain not responding.