[SIMS] Positive Discipline Hour Causing SIMS to Crash

[jonnykewell1]

Good Morning Everyone,

 

We moved over to SIMS during summer and introduced a new behaviour system which is used in the Academy Trust we are looking to join. Once a week staff have a "Positive Discipline Hour" where they meet up with their form and enter all Positive/Negative comments from their planners onto SIMS in the behavior management section. During this hour teachers have problems with SIMS crashing and closing numerous times. We have had lengthy discussions with our SIMS support provider who have also had discussions with Capita and they have been told that it's because so many people are saving changes into the database at the same time and it's creating large transaction logs. A couple of patches have also been applied but it doesn't seem to have made much difference.

 

I spoke with the Infrastructure manager from the other Academies and he has said that they too have have similar issues however a member of our SLT has spoken to the Data Manager there and they said they don't? The pressure has been ramped up by SLT to try and find a solution to this but other than splitting up the PD Hour (which i'm told is not possible) i'm not sure what else we can do. SIMS seems to run absolutely fine for the rest of the week so what they have told me makes perfect sense.

 

Does anybody else run a similar system and have problems or have they experienced similar issues in the past? If so have you managed to find a fix or a way round it? The server is brand new so i'm quite happy that it's not that, we do run a lot of laptops which connect over WiFi but it's never caused a problem in the past.

 

Any advise would be much appreciated.

 

Jonny

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

I would suggest getting your SIMS support to profile your SIMS server and network during the PD Hour looking for bottlenecks. If you want to do it your self there are plenty of guides on the web, e.g. this one I've used before.

The most frequent issue I've come accross is disk I/O bottlenecks.

Edited December 7, 2017 by Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun

[jonnykewell1]

Thanks I will have a look at this. It sounds like this might be the next step actually from discussions i've had.

[PhilNeal]

SIMS shouldn't be crashing in this way.

 

I would say that by working in this way the school is losing the opportunity of acting quickly on using the information. I've been into a lot of schools that have done away with the paper discipline records and have SMT monitor positive and negative instances as they happen. There's nothing more effective than SMT telling a child in the corridor that you've seen that they did a great thing in the last lesson. Equally if something is getting out of hand - say 3 low level disruptions - SMT going into the class making it known that its been noticed is very powerful.