SIMS getting slower and slower to launch

[psydii]

Hi,

 

We're seeing SIMS taking longer and longer to get from the splash screen to the homepage.

 

Anyone got any tips/thoughts on what might be the cause or how we might address it?

 

Thanks

P.

[Michael]

Agreed - I think in part this has been since the .NET Framework 4.7 requirement. The only solution are much faster workstations - SSDs make a big difference.

[bezzoh]

Am I right in guessing you might use Groupcall?

[3s-gtech]

How big is the database getting (and the logs)? What storage is the server on, and is it healthy?

[DrCheese]

Agreed - I think in part this has been since the .NET Framework 4.7 requirement. The only solution are much faster workstations - SSDs make a big difference.

 

Aye, I think it's since the .net change as well - SSDs are par for the course nowadays tho & even the latest workstations have it crawling.

 

I would slap SSDs in our SAN, but I don' think it's that that's causing the slowdowns. It's the client redrawing

[Michael]

How big is the database getting (and the logs)? What storage is the server on, and is it healthy?

 

DB sizes looking at two examples are 1.3GB and 2GB - both Primaries, so definitely not massive.

[Michael]

Am I right in guessing you might use Groupcall?

 

I think practically every school I've ever worked in uses Groupcall. Why would this influence the speed of SIMS?

 

Most of the time it actions changes in the early hours of the morning, but I'd consider it light compared to SIMS itself.

[3s-gtech]

No, those shouldn't be an issue in that regard.

 

The server loves to get everything in RAM and not swap - so disk speed is less of an issue if the server/VM has enough RAM for the DBs entirely.

 

How quickly does the client install load on the server?

[mavhc]

To check the SQL server itself: within SQL Server Management Studio:

 

Right click on the database, select Reports > Standard Reports > Object Execution Statistics

[Michael]

On the server - SIMS logon screen 4 seconds.

 

Signing into SIMS, again on the server - 38 seconds.

 

This is on a 2016 Hyper-V VM, 16GB memory (sitting at 71%), 6 CPUs, 15K SAS RAID6 (2GB SIMS DB).

[3s-gtech]

Have you re-indexed recently? The patch should persist in SOLUS3. Sometimes seen good results from this, other times not.

[mavhc]

Just testing here, SIMS takes about a minute to load, but there's no excessive SQL queries, they're all a few milliseconds at most.

 

After closing and reopening, only takes 20 seconds, so that's mostly disk cache.

 

So next step is running Process Monitor, filter for Process Name = Pulsar.exe

 

There's a 2.5 second pause after reading HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL12.SIMS2014\MSSQLServer\CurrentVersion, I assume that's when it connects to the sql server

 

In general turn off capture, clear the list, filter to pulsar.exe only. Then click OK in simsload to start the process, preferably at 0 seconds past the minute, stop capture once it loads, then scroll through looking for large time jumps, a second or more.

[psydii]

On the server - SIMS logon screen 4 seconds.

 

Signing into SIMS, again on the server - 38 seconds.

 

This is on a 2016 Hyper-V VM, 16GB memory (sitting at 71%), 6 CPUs, 15K SAS RAID6 (2GB SIMS DB).

 

2Gb database?! It think ours is more like 12Gb.

 

Just timed it. A few seconds to the logon screen. Then between 25 and 70 seconds to the SIMS Homepage.

 

I feel that if it was consistently 25 seconds I would not mention it. But 30/40+ is slow enough to cause me (and colleagues) frustration.

 

We have loads of 3rd party sync running, but nothing in that regard has changed in the last few months.

 

Perhaps a re-index might be needed, not sure when we last had one done. Various maintenance tasks are scheduled to run periodically which seem to have kept things performant up to this point.

 

Strange thing is that once were on it runs just fine.

 

P.

[3s-gtech]

Massive, unkempt user database? Can't imagine that adds a lot of logon time but it may - I pull users back out of System Manager once they leave.

[bezzoh]

Groupcall stores every message including attachments inside the SIMS db. It’s the reason ours are so slow too. One Db is over 60GB. ESS have a cleanup routine for it. It “significantly improves performance” but is destructive in that it wipes out your attachments and can also delete the majority of messages that are 12 months+ old. Edited November 28, 2022 by bezzoh
Typo

[mavhc]

No point guessing, get more data with the tools provided.

[Sonic007]

We reboot the SQL server every month or so. Speeds things up.