[sims] Sims Server Performance Benchmarks

[zag]

I'm really interested in what other schools performance is like from their Sims server?

 

I find it incredibly slow even with a brand new server just installed by Capita.

 

850 student school (SQL 2012, Solus 3, Discover)

 

Sims server

Virtual Hyper-V, 10GB RAM, 4 Cores Xeon "E5-2430L" @ 2.ghz, SSD drive, Gbit NIC

 

Sims Benchmarks

11 Seconds Client Load time

13 seconds Reports >> Students >> addresses >> Year 7 >> 1 Reg Group

3+ Seconds Search "Smith" student name in main screen search box

6 Seconds Solus 3 launch on server Scrolling agents is also really slow

 

Sims Database

Sims.mdf - 3.10 GB

Sims.ldf - 656 MB

Simsdiscover_Primary.mdf - 419 MB

Simsdiscover_Primary.ldf - 894 MB

 

I've run the Re-indexing patch but not sure what else to do to improve performance??

[vikpaw]

1500 student school (SQL 2008 R2, Solus 2)

 

Sims server

VMWare ESX VSphere 4 Advanced, 16GB RAM, 4 Cores Xeon X5460 @ 3.16Ghz , IBM S-chassis with local attached shared storage Gbit NIC

 

Sims Benchmarks

1-2 Seconds to get login prompt i.e. run simsload and check for update.

15 Seconds Client Load time - used to be quicker and can be sometimes, though i'm low on RAM at the mo. (64bit win 7 client with 8GB)

15 seconds Reports >> Students >> addresses >> Year 9 >> 1 Reg Group (22 students)

8 Seconds Search "Muhammad" student name in main screen search box but i probably have more of them than you have Smiths!

6 Seconds Solus 3 launch on server Scrolling agents is also really slow

 

Sims Database

Sims.mdf - 4.50 GB

Sims.ldf - 129 MB

=================================

 

It's slower than it has been in the past and it's not being used much at the mo' to be honest.

However, we're quite happy with it. In fact i think for most users it's much quicker than my benchmarks and they don't normally complain. I blame my RAM usage for it running slow here as i rarely have more than a few MB free.

 

You should talk to @bossman his stats will make you cry - he may also be best placed to give advice on tweaking - otherwise look at the many other threads that look at the structure of the server, location of data files, type of RAID being used, and other SQL optimisation techniques.

[localzuk]

550 student school (SQL 2008 r2, Solus 3, Discover)

 

Sims server

Virtual Hyper-V, 12GB RAM, 16 Cores Xeon "E5-2690 v1" @ 2.9ghz, SSD RAID array, 10Gbit NIC

 

Sims Benchmarks

6 Seconds Client Load time

7 seconds Reports >> Students >> addresses >> Year 7 >> 1 Reg Group

2 Seconds Search "Smith" student name in main screen search box

5 Seconds Solus 3 launch on server

 

Sims Database

Sims.mdf - 1.7GB

Sims.ldf - 3.8GB

discover.mdf - 145 MB

Simsdiscover_Primary.ldf - 1GB

 

Our backups are being problematic at the moment (hence the ldf file sizes).

Edited November 5, 2013 by localzuk

[vikpaw]

Just whack it into Simple mode unless you're being fancy with your backups and plan to use the transaction logs.

[tmcd35]

850 student school (SQL 2008, Solus 2)

Sims server

Virtual Hyper-V, Dynamic upto 8GB RAM - Currently 5.6Gb, 4 Cores Opteron "6128" @ 2.ghz, 10Gb VNIC to virtual switch with 2Gb (bonded pair) uplink to core

SLG, ADPS and Documents are all on seperate servers

 

Sims Benchmarks

32 Seconds Client Load time (on a thin client (4core+HT, 12Gb server), Automatic login, no SIMSLoad)

12 seconds Reports >> Students >> addresses >> Year 9 >> 1 Reg Group

15 Seconds Search "Smith" student name in main screen search box

12 Seconds Solus 2 launch on server

Sims Database

1.7Gb according to SQL Manager

1.2Gb last backup

[pantscat]

This is very interesting - with all of the SIMS Schools that I've dealt with they've all been less than impressed with the performance.

 

1500-ish student school (Server 2008R2 with SQL 2008R2, Solus3 and Discover)

 

Sims server

Running on VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1, 4 vCPU (Quad Xeon X5650), 16GB RAM, NetApp FAS SAN with SATA drives (!), 1Gbit NIC.

 

Our SAN is the achilles heel in this config - although it has lots of spindles the fact that it's based around SATA disks does make it a tad slow at times, but it'll be interesting to see how much of an impact this causes.

 

Sims Benchmarks

8 Seconds Client Load time

21 seconds Reports >> Students >> addresses >> Year 7 >> 1 Reg Group

2 Seconds Search "Smith" student name in main screen search box

40 Seconds Solus 3 launch on server Scrolling agents is also really slow

 

Sims.mdf – 6.5 GB

Simsdiscover_Primary.mdf – 730 MB

[bossman]

750 students 120 Sims clients (SQL2008R2 on Windows Server 2008R2, Solus3, Discover, FMS)

 

Sims server

Zenserver VM , 8GB RAM, 4 Cores Xeon "E5440" @ 2.83GHz speed 2826MHz, SAS15k drive, 2 x 1Gbit NIC

 

Sims Benchmarks

1 Second login screen

8 Seconds Client Load time

7 seconds Reports >> Students >> addresses >> Year 7 >> 1 Reg Group

3 Seconds Search "Smith" student name in main screen search box

7 Seconds Solus 3 launch on server

 

Sims Database

Sims.PDF - 2.69 GB

discover.PDF - 282 MB

FMS.PDF - 428 MB

Solus.PDF - 9.25 MB

 

Backups done by SQL Management Studio every night with transaction logs and on Sunday after it has done backups another scheduled task deletes all but the last 3 backups to keep everything nice and tidy.

Edited November 5, 2013 by bossman

[zag]

So basically the slow performance is being experienced by just about everybody?

 

Even with the quickest hardware?

[jinnantonnixx]

So basically the slow performance is being experienced by just about everybody?

 

Even with the quickest hardware?

 

Tongue in cheek, but...

Wirth's law is a computing adage made popular by Niklaus Wirth in 1995. It states that "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

and

May's law, named after David May, is a variant where: "Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore's Law."

[tmcd35]

It states that "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

 

Carp programming then?

[DMcCoy]

Of course none of the figures will be any use until you know if it's full SQL or SQL express, express having that terrible 1GB RAM limit for the queries.

[vikpaw]

Of course none of the figures will be any use until you know if it's full SQL or SQL express, express having that terrible 1GB RAM limit for the queries.

 

I thought everyone gave their version of SQL I'd expect them to have specified if it was express.

 

As for slow performance, perhaps that is what they expect. If everyone has similar ish experiences who's to say it is slow. Only slower than expected. Or slower than another system. Be interesting to compare these benchmarks on older versions of software when we probably all also had much slower hardware!

[bossman]

Probably because Sims is not a true relational database more a patchwork of tables cobble together and data extracted with rather long SQL code which is possibly why it is slower than most databases of the same ilk.

 

I could be wrong but then again I might not be too far off the mark, as Capita add more and more functionality by way of more features it actually makes it slower.

 

What do you all think?

[vikpaw]

There was a quote at BETT, "It's not first normal; it's not even 'normal'!" or something similar.

[localzuk]

Yup, the data is so far from normalised it might as will be in text files. The excuse I heard was that it is due to legacy programs and support.

[FishCustard]

Yup, the data is so far from normalised it might as will be in text files. The excuse I heard was that it is due to legacy programs and support.

 

'Legacy programs' being the polite term for the Windows 9x-era excrement (Nova, Options, Exams, etc) that should have been either rewritten in .NET or (better) integrated into the core codebase. Yes, rewriting an app from scratch is often not the best way to go about things from a software development point of view, but sometimes you have little choice.

[dwhyte85]

Re-writing the code that deals with the data wont make it any faster, it might look a bit prettier but it will still access the data in the same way. I think SQL Express is definitely worth checking, short of that try profile what your SQL server is doing - you might just find it's obscenely complex queries to get minimal data out as localzuk & bossman have said.

[FishCustard]

Absolutely right, but rewriting the data access code may allow you to use better back-end methods for storing said data (normalized tables, etc), which is what I think @localzuk was getting at.

[localzuk]

Indeed. This is why using an MVC programming architecture is a good thing when making data handling programs - even if you get the database massively wrong at first, you can fix it without major changes to your presentation layer!

 

So, effectively, you can massively improve ancient programs without much effort.

[zag]

I really wish they would update options, nova and exams to use proper SQL and have the new interfaces

[FishCustard]

Indeed. This is why using an MVC programming architecture is a good thing when making data handling programs - even if you get the database massively wrong at first, you can fix it without major changes to your presentation layer!

 

This. Although in the case of Capita, I think "This is why using a ... programming architecture is a good thing when making ... programs" would be a good start for their dev team!

[matt40k]

Issue is Capita motto is, if it ain't fix, don't touch it, unless you can sell it. The benefit of not upgrading everything and leaving some bits in an old version is you don't have to re-tender because it's not a "new" product. Still that's become more popular in "cloud" world as you can do faster build cycle. Plus side of being in the UK is that the government cloud allows you to see what people are spending money on in the cloud - Sales Information - G-CloudG-Cloud

 

That's assuming they go down the proper paths of course.

[CAM]

Am I the only one who feels they are taking some unfair stick on here lately? Discover was provided free and even then it had to answer a challenge from other providers over anti-competition laws. Performance Management was also meant to be free but had to be charged due to the same issue.

 

Some parts do need a serious update, I can't see why we have Windows 3.11 era programs like Options still kicking around in the admin back-ends. But I have been watching SIMS improve considerably over the last few years for teacher facing parts of the system as the MIS market has opened up.

[fiza]

My client load time is 26 secs. It seems alot higher than everyone elses. We have SIMS Server on a VM with 16GB RAM and 4 vCPUs. We have full sql. Our clients are Core2Duo 2.80GHz Win 7 64bit 4GB RAM.

Once SIMS is running it seems to be ok. 4 secs to find "smith".

 

Loading SIMS first time takes 26 secs, close it and log in again and it takes 8 secs.

 

Anything I can do to improve that first load time?

[localzuk]

@CAM I think the stick comes from people being sick of issues. We've almost gone back to the same era of annoyances as 5 years ago - where each update was a nightmare. How many of the latest updates have been withdrawn or re-released?

 

Combine that with the fact the underlying database is *still* a mess, however many years after SIMS .Net appeared, and the fact that there are still modules which are, as you say, 3.11 era stuff, and people get a bit annoyed.