[sims] Anyone having trouble running reports?

[ChrisH]

We keep having trouble with SIMS slowing down and sometimes completely crashing (for everyone). The only thing I can attribute it to is when certain reports are run but not always. The reports in question are gathering achievement and behaviour data which is then processed by Excel. These reports are set from the beginning of term to the current day. When I first created these reports I'm sure they only took about 7 minutes to run and slightly longer as the year progressed. These reports now take up to 40 minutes to run. The first thing I did was report it to our local support and got the re-indexing patch and the other patch. I know all the housekeeping routines had been done as I do them at the end of the year, every year.

 

While everything else is running on Hyper-V the SIMS server has its own dedicated hardware with dual quad core processors 16 gigs of ram and local SAS storage. SQL is limited to 10 gig and our SIMS database is only 4 gig, so there is no problem with capacity there. The other SQL files are all normal size according to the relevant databases. We are running SQL 2012 and this is fully updated.

 

I am seeing the odd deadlock error but this is very rare. When SIMS is not responding there is absolutely no problem getting a remote desktop to the server. The CPU usage is fairly minimal and the memory usage can be anywhere between 53-80%. Disk access seems fine as well.

I have tried to cross reference the times that SIMS become unresponsive with other scheduled tasks such as Group call etc but most of the time these task aren't running/or have run recently at the time we are having an issue.

Event viewer doesn't shed any light.

Monitoring the network connection does not bring up any errors (I haven't gone as far as a packet trace yet)

 

The issue generally goes away after 10 mins or so. Everything has been scanned and I have even toned down the AV to see if that's causing an issue. I have absolutely no errors to go off (apart from the occasional deadlock running reports). All in all I'm a bit stuck at the moment. I have been running big reports via command reporter over night to try and help but this is not really ideal as some information is needed at short notice.

 

Anyone got any ideas? Anyone else having similar issues at the moment?

Edited October 24, 2016 by ChrisH

[RogerCorrigan]

What are the specs of your document server(s)? Are they on the same server as SIMS SQL? A problem we recently had with running reports/uploading documents was that the DMS service kept stopping. I mean usually if it's stopped you're completely unable to run specific reports, but it could be a factor in slowing you down :/. Is the rest of SIMS fairly quick for you? i.e, only reports are slow

[jslate1980]

I'm having the same issue since the summer upgrade. The performance of my sims server is getting worse with each update. Currently running on a physical box dual six core processor, 32gb ram with 10k drives. But to rule out the server currently installing sims to a VM. Edited October 26, 2016 by jslate1980

[ChrisH]

Everything is on the same server. Sims general performance is okay there's only generally a short delay when doing things.

I have seen other issues though like the attendance managers pc likes to freeze Sims when you minimise it, and disappears but comes on again if you click on SIMS but goes straight back into SIMS with no login. I even swapped her PC but it started doing it again after a few days. There's no special software on her PC and I don't get that issue anywhere else.

 

Today my Sims kept freezing when I was trying to change a pupils class membership every time, if I tried something else it worked fine, I replicated that 5 times and then tried it later and it worked first time!

[whosagooner]

We are having similar issues. Before the half term we had a detention register report which worked with no problems. Over the break the Network Manager did some updates which has now made these reports stop working.

 

Any advice on what he can maybe do to sort this?

[dapaulio]

Try redesigning the reports from scratch. I had a case of this where staff had created a report years ago. Redesigned the report from scratch and it ran better. Took me ages to find the culprit though. Still waiting for capita to action the change request to allow admin to delete other users created reports.

[dapaulio]

Also whilst doing this some of the reports that had text filters. Staff had used a filter with text that wasn't a valid response. Found this would make sims sit in a loop for ages

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

Still waiting for capita to action the change request to allow admin to delete other users created reports.

Capita have sort of done that one

If another user has created the report and you are running version 7.168 or later of SIMS go to

Reports | Design Report | Open Existing Report | Owners | Drag and drop the reports from the owner that is no longer at the school into an owner who is at the school. That owner can then delete the reports.