[sims] Slow (even slower) individual reports

[SouthCoastSaint]

I appear to have hit a new low with my reports. Would really welcome any suggestions or fixes.

 

Have had a new Sharp printer installed (MC-C312) which means that at the moment I am unable to print individual reports directly from Sims. Report generates, then shows in print queue as spooling but the printer generated box that I have to click to say yes to my code never appears. (This is an aside as the slowness problem would still be there even if the printer was working).

 

Anyway, last night, I ran a year group of 360 individual reports to export to a folder. I started them before 3pm and ran them directly from the Sims server. I have come in this morning to see they didn't finish until 00.14. I know I have a lot of tags but SURELY this can't be right. I have another 4 year groups to run, even just re-printing the odd one takes so long, it's not fit for purpose.

 

Has anyone got any suggestions on how I can speed up the process?

 

Thanks for any help.

[bobsmith]

what's your SQL server spec?

 

what's your client pc spec?

 

how many pages, how many tags, anything super complicated about your report.

[SouthCoastSaint]

Hi Bob,

 

Ran them on the server and was no quicker than on my pc which would indicate either my template or Sims in general. We have had instances of Sims grinding to a halt at various times and yet when i look at the Sims server, the CPU is running nice and low so that may be worth exploring.

 

My template - I would say it's not over large or complicated, but size is all relative, so I am unsure.

 

1st page - 15 subjects, 4 tags each plus class teacher, 15 PE sport tags, and 4 misc tags.

2nd Page - 15 subjects, 2 tags each.

3rd Page, 15 subjects, 4 tags each.

 

Does that count as large?

 

As these are Year 7, I dread to think how long to generate a year 10 or 11 one with 36 subjects.

[bobsmith]

nope, that's not overlarge, I had a 25 page template which ran perfectly fine a couple of weeks back.

 

can you generate a single student and time it for us?

[SouthCoastSaint]

One report took 2:09 to generate, about half of the time it was retrieving tags, then after that generating.

 

No picture in the report, I did have bullet points which I have removed.

 

I can't see how my report is that much more complicated than when i was able to manage them reasonably, so it can only be assumed it's our system.

[Barcrest]

When did you last reboot your Sims server? If you can, reboot it at lunch time and see if you notice it performing better after it restarts. If you can't do it lunchtime do it at the end of the day and try the report straight after. We had an issue on the old server where it was just using more and more memory and a reboot seemed to rectify this issue.

 

With regards to your printer I set up my PC to print directly to the printers IP address, this allowed me to put my pin in the locally installed driver so it didn't prompt me every page when running individual reports. You should be able to do the same, by passing the print server and whatever settings that has set up on it.

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

I don't know if it's relevant but Capita have recently released this "Patch 21691 [3.62.261-3.62.377] Optomisation from Get Results stored proc" which I've been told by their help desk "this optimisation Patch affects the entirety of Assessment Manager 7."