[sims] SIMS is running sloooow!!

[Jawloms]

Morning,

 

When we try and do pretty much anything on SIMS, it's taking an age. I don't mean asking it to process data, I mean clicking the "Student" button at the top, or trying to open the "Report" screen. Surely these should just be trying to load different parts of the GUI and don't involve much data transmitting (apart from what permission the user has in that menu) yet I see a spike in network traffic.

 

I've already shrunk the LDF. The server is a VM and has 40GB allocated to it. The mdf file is a little over 6GB. According to Task Manager, the server is constantly using 16GB of that. In SQL Management Studio, The min and max memory are the defaults of 0 and 2147483647MB.

 

Anyone got any ideas what's going on?

 

Stuart

[Tefters]

SIMS is dire at the moment... The Summer patch has really done a number on us.

 

Ours is absolutely pooping the bed with deadlock errors and users being kicked out, possibly related to Next-Gen through SSM (Sims Service Manager) which I have currently got disabled as part of the testing.

 

Third party apps have also caused issues due to the new attendance codes being pushed early and then not being ready.

 

I have an absolute nightmare with it at the moment and am just going through the process of elimination.

 

All this for £25k+ a year licensing and support, GREAT!

[3s-gtech]

You should cap the top end of the SQL RAM allocation, or it'll start impacting on the host OS if left on for long enough. Shouldn't be a major issue with a 6GB DB and 40GB or RAM, but you can cut that RAM allocation in half and it'll still perform better if capped. Min should be the size of the DB.

 

Is the host server busy? How many threads assigned to the VM?

[Jawloms]

The host seems to be ticking along quite happily. It's got 24 logical processors, of which I've given the SIMS server 4.

 

So even though the usage never seems to waiver from it's 16GB it uses, it's still worth me setting Maximum Server Memory to 20480MB?

 

For info - It is full SQL, and we don't run FMS.

[psydii]

Anyone altering the timetable or running reports that pull data across multiple areas? We find it always has a slow down around census and large curriculum / timetable changes (because attendance marks need to be remapped).

 

What's the underlying disk situation? Are there snapshots running?

 

Do you have a 3rd party attendance or other integrations that might run during the day? Can you try turning these off (in a systematic way) to test if they might be a cause?

 

We also get time outs and slow behaviour when the backup is running.. so might be an idea just to check that's not happening.

[rossibIT]

Are you using Wonde? Look at the user logs and see if they are pulling the reports during the day which slowed our SIMS down.

 

If you are then get in contact and tell them to only take there reports during out of office hours.

 

Ross

[Jawloms]

It's slow at all times, for everyone so I don't think it's due to others running large reports or third party things otherwise presumably it would be sporadic? Been like it for weeks.

 

Server disk space is fine, no snapshots running.

 

Backups are overnight.

 

We are using Wonde, but that's not currently doing anything.