PotNoodleTech Posted April 30, 2021 Posted April 30, 2021 Just wondering if any other schools having the same problem - very, very poor sims performance literally since the Easter holidays. Our LEA host SIMS and they seem to be stumped. I persoanlly think it's a hardware issue but am putting this out there in case anyone else has noticed significantly poorer performance since easter. Thanks.
BKGarry Posted April 30, 2021 Posted April 30, 2021 not seen any issues myself, but I have seen some nightmare LEA hosted SIMS down in our neck of the woods. 1
bobsmith Posted April 30, 2021 Posted April 30, 2021 We did the latest upgrade over Easter and users have been moaning about slow downs in SIMS, but performance has been so bad for so long I can't notice the difference. We're locally hosted and we don't have any hardware issues currently. 1
milesla Posted April 30, 2021 Posted April 30, 2021 Hi After a version update of SIMS you should always apply optimisation patches 20647 and 22573, you'd have to check if this is is included in SOLUS 3 - if not then you will need to request them from Capita (I do this manually as am still using SOLUS v2 - we're leaving SIMS soon anyway). After that Database Diagnostics should be run from Tools > System Diagnostics > Database Diagnostics. And also the Validate Memberships Tool should also be run - this can take a some time. You should also archive Attendance data - just keep the last 3 years - this does have a big impact on SIMS performance too. Also Check your AV solution isn't scanning everything all the time for either Read or Write access - your preference. For those on hosted I guess the same principles apply but presumably the LEA take care of all of that. Goodluck 4
Michael Posted April 30, 2021 Posted April 30, 2021 Not had any issues, but on locally hosted not remote hosted. Remote hosted could anything - SQL database version, hardware problems, Windows Update problems. I wonder also on the type of hardware/management - presumably a VPS of some kind so you're segregated from all other schools? If it's all on one massive/powerful host, definitely not how I'd do it.
sefton Posted May 14, 2021 Posted May 14, 2021 One of our schools is running dreadfully, I actually timed it on the server this morning and it took 1m 45s just to open Design Report. I've gone through almost every step of the KB on addressing performance issues, just the widgets left to do which I've just emailed staff to say I'm restricting as of Monday, and nothing has seen any improvement. The VM has has 4 AMD Opteron 6212 and 64GB memory. I'm all out of ideas, if the removal of widgets doesn't see an improvement I'll be on to Sims support next week.
Michael Posted May 14, 2021 Posted May 14, 2021 One of our schools is running dreadfully, I actually timed it on the server this morning and it took 1m 45s just to open Design Report. I've gone through almost every step of the KB on addressing performance issues, just the widgets left to do which I've just emailed staff to say I'm restricting as of Monday, and nothing has seen any improvement. The VM has has 4 AMD Opteron 6212 and 64GB memory. I'm all out of ideas, if the removal of widgets doesn't see an improvement I'll be on to Sims support next week. I'm looking at a local SIMS instance, Server 2016, 16GB of memory sitting at 60%, running on an Intel Xeon Silver = no issues.
mw184 Posted May 14, 2021 Posted May 14, 2021 No performance related issues here. Except in a few instances where suddenly SIMS would refuse to connect to the database after the update had been received on the server. Had to change the connect.ini file and manually install the update on the machines in question but apart from that nothing has been reported to me about performance issues.
3s-gtech Posted May 14, 2021 Posted May 14, 2021 Though SQL should load everything into RAM to reduce swapping, perhaps the host server is overstretched when it comes to disk waits? Seems unlikely with 64GB of RAM - unless that RAM is actually allocated across other VMs too. If that's the case, it'll run like a dog.
Michael Posted May 14, 2021 Posted May 14, 2021 Though SQL should load everything into RAM to reduce swapping, perhaps the host server is overstretched when it comes to disk waits? Seems unlikely with 64GB of RAM - unless that RAM is actually allocated across other VMs too. If that's the case, it'll run like a dog. This is just it - I'd probably say 64GB of memory overall, shared between hosts. This is fine for other VMs, but not DB type VMs. So by this logic, probably no more than 4 SIMS/FMS instances shared, depending on the number of users at each school too; Secondary would of course be a lot greater compared to a Primary. If it was 64GB per VM, it'd be a beast of a server - 8 SIMS/FMS instances with a system total of 512GB of memory.
sefton Posted May 14, 2021 Posted May 14, 2021 This is just it - I'd probably say 64GB of memory overall, shared between hosts. This is fine for other VMs, but not DB type VMs. So by this logic, probably no more than 4 SIMS/FMS instances shared, depending on the number of users at each school too; Secondary would of course be a lot greater compared to a Primary. If it was 64GB per VM, it'd be a beast of a server - 8 SIMS/FMS instances with a system total of 512GB of memory. I'm not in the school today so I can't log into the VMware but I've logged into the AD and one of the file servers and they have 8GB allocated each, so the 64GB is dedicated to the MIS server and not overall for the VMs. The memory is running at about 40% of the capacity so there certainly shouldn't be any need for swap files on the disks.
sefton Posted May 14, 2021 Posted May 14, 2021 The problem I've got is our Network Manager is on long term absence so I'm loath to mess with anything but the memory usage for the SQL server is capped so never goes above the 40%, I'm wondering if that is the bottleneck.
3s-gtech Posted May 14, 2021 Posted May 14, 2021 (edited) How big is the (SIMS+SOLUS+Discover) DB? If it's bigger than the allocated memory for SQL Server, you'll have constant swaps - hugely so. If your DBs are that big, you'll need to look at slimming them down as they shouldn't take up all 25GB normally. Edited May 14, 2021 by 3s-gtech
sefton Posted May 14, 2021 Posted May 14, 2021 Currently at 13GB for Sims, 9GB for Solus and 2GB for Discover. I've setup the ShrinkDB batch file to run tonight.
Boredguy Posted May 14, 2021 Posted May 14, 2021 Solus shouldn't be 9Gb, so sounds like that might need the tidy up run
sefton Posted May 17, 2021 Posted May 17, 2021 Ran ShrinkDB against all the 3 databases, it's reduced the size, in particular Solus 3. I thought it was set up as a scheduled job but obviously not, think it may have dropped off when IT put a new Server 2016 VM on, so I'll have to put them in task scheduler this week. Sims is still running slowly and the only thing left is removing widgets so I'll try that this week although it won't be popular with some staff.
willtech Posted May 19, 2021 Posted May 19, 2021 (edited) One thing we noticed was this KB if you are running 2016: https://support.capitasoftware.com/csm?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0036825 But I am guessing you already have this set. Edited May 19, 2021 by willtech
sefton Posted May 20, 2021 Posted May 20, 2021 Yes, we have it running in2012 compatibility mode and not Native mode. I've been timing some routine tasks on, starting with a log in of 1 m 6s, and I've raised it as a ticket with Sims so I'll see how I go on with them.
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