[sims] SIMS - Does it still take hours/days to run school reports?

[benIT]

My previous experience of SIMS was a non efficient creation of end of year school reports that took hours or even days to compile.

 

I visited a school recently that said they don’t dare run all years reports at the same time, with fear it runs into days.

 

Your feedback welcomed as to how fair this assumption is in today’s SIMS - not the new one in 2 years [emoji1]

[bobsmith]

Well written "individual reports" are tedious but the time is measured in minutes rather than hours.

 

Profiles on the other hand can take a silly amount of time to run.

[MrLudwig]

Ours can take a few hours to churn through rather than days. But oddly the bit that takes the time is the printing. Generating the reports seems to go through OK, but it seems to take minutes to send each one to print. This doesn’t happen for anything else being printed, just the student reports from within Sims.

[bobsmith]

We took a look with our print engineer one day when we were blaming the new machines they provided for causing the printing issues.

 

SIMS can turn a simple XML file into a 150Mb file while it's in the spooler!

 

It was actually causing the physical print server to crash when it ran out of RAM.

[DeeleyNet]

The time to produce a print run is the reason I switched to running 'Individual Reports' instead. I then combine the individual pdf files to a single Printable file for our reprographics tech and this seems to ensure things run smoothly.

 

Entire process from start to finish including the print time is around 45 minutes for a single Year Group.

[ITGURU]

SIMS report generation is also depended on your SIMS server and configuration. when we joined a trust I was told our SIMS server was faster at generating reports and wanted to know why. we run SIMS on dedicated hardware whereas they were running on virtual from SAN. if we do a edit academic year it can stall our SIMS for a few minutes but at the other school it can take up to half hour. normal reports are also quicker on physical.