[sims] Data Manager questioning Server Performance during intake!

[kennysarmy]

Our Data Manager has questioned our Server performance during the admitting of our new Year 7's and 12's this week.

 

How long would you expect the process to have taken, there were approximately 260 new SIMS accounts created?

 

Stats on our VM appear to show it was not particularly stressed this week!

 

The VM is allocated 24Gb of RAM and has 4 cores of CPU.

 

Are there any SIMS performance tests we can carry out to ensure everything is running OK?

 

Or does the admission process just generally take a long time?

[Seb1780]

It took me around 20-30 mins to do our Year 7 (250 pupils) and a similar time to do our Y12 (220 students); both were done on PD days with not much demand on SIMS from other users. This is normal for me.

[kennysarmy]

It took me around 20-30 mins to do our Year 7 (250 pupils) and a similar time to do our Y12 (220 students); both were done on PD days with not much demand on SIMS from other users. This is normal for me.

 

Hi,

Is that a Physical Server? Virtual? and what RAM and CPU allocation is that please?

[kennysarmy]

Data Manager has commented further:

 

OK to import an entire year group - so Year 7 it took 1 hour and 20 mins for 198 pupils. Even for 45 Y12 pupils it took well over 45 mins.

 

To remove a year group was even worse - it took an entire day to remove Y13 and I had to do it in tutor groups as it crashed SIMS across the school and this was during the holidays when only I and exams were using SIMS. Admitting students also crashed SIMS across the entire school for everyone else.

 

I appreciate that they are quite intensive operations and thus they take time but also day to day running this week in particular has been really slow and sluggish and not up to it's usual performance.

 

I question this because we are not a SIMS school at all - there may be a dozen people max in the school actually using it all day. This compared with a typical school where over 85-90% of staff are using it throughout the day.

[Chaniel]

We run our SIMS server as a VM and while I can't give you times it took to add the new intake, I can say that it wasn't very long as it was done during the first period (so probably about 20-30mins for 200 new starters). Our VM is allocated 4 vCPU and has taken up 20GB of RAM.

 

What I would consider you testing or looking at is the storage the SIMS server is using, SIMS will always devour RAM because SQL will happily take all the RAM allocated to it (double check you've not limited the SIMS SQL Instance to a low memory) but if your storage can't keep up, you might see it being bottlenecked there.

 

Just two other things to check

[Oaktech]

I would point at SQL-disk performance - It was always that way with CMIS. Server would be sat 10% CPU, 60-80% ram, but 100% disk with a massive queue.

[kennysarmy]

We run our SIMS server as a VM and while I can't give you times it took to add the new intake, I can say that it wasn't very long as it was done during the first period (so probably about 20-30mins for 200 new starters). Our VM is allocated 4 vCPU and has taken up 20GB of RAM.

 

What I would consider you testing or looking at is the storage the SIMS server is using, SIMS will always devour RAM because SQL will happily take all the RAM allocated to it (double check you've not limited the SIMS SQL Instance to a low memory) but if your storage can't keep up, you might see it being bottlenecked there.

 

Just two other things to check

 

 

These are the memory settings: