[sims] SIMS Not responding (Pulsar.exe)

[JNStiles]

Hi,

 

We've recently been experiencing a large amount of not responding errors on SIMS installed on client PC's. The issue only seems to occur when saving assessment marksheets, following an edit or removing it from certain criteria, i.e. year group. After saving the assessment (and it doesn't happen everytime) SIMS will go blank and display not responding, where this usually lasts for 10-25 minutes and will eventually complete the save.

 

Obviously the pulsar exe is what's hanging and upon viewing it in resource monitor (screenshot below) it doesn't appear to be hogging any resources - disk/RAM/network/cpu. I'm in contact with IMS, our local SIMS support team, but I just wanted to check and see if anyone else has experienced this issue in their environment?

 

 

Thanks, Jay.

[vikpaw]

Is it possible there are more than one person accessing the same marksheet?

It's worth taking a look at what is happening on the server when this happens, maybe high CPU utilisation or other resource issue.

[superfletch]

It might also be worth doing a trawl and see how many old marksheets/templates you have in Assessment that are no longer used. (You might want to speak to your schools Assessment guru about this). and delete as many old/unused/unnecessary marksheets and templates as you can.

[Linfit]

We get this a lot. We have a number of very large summary marksheets for KS3 subjects which behave in exactly the way you describe. Its not pulsar or the workstation, its the server. If you monitor the server when the edit is happening you will see it max out CPU time on one of the cores and just sit there until it eventually completes the save. We have had our local support team look into it and they reckon its just bad coding. We have a high spec server with acres of spare RAM, loads of cores - doesn't matter - the process maxes out whichever core its running on and it takes as long as it takes.