[sims] Individual Reports take forever to generate

[LosOjos]

Is it just us, or does this happen to everyone?

 

I know it's a very large template (about 85 pages with 10 results on each page), but surely it's just a mail merge?!

 

It is literally taking 10 minutes per student to generate the report, it's as though SIMS downloads the data every time it starts on a new student, it's extremely irritating!

 

I'm actually considering downloading the data myself in future and using a mail merge, as this is just ridiculous! The only problem then of course is that I can't batch upload them to the SIMS DMS.

 

So has anybody found a way of speeding them up?

[Sivadam]

I cannot offer any specific advice in speeding up your printing.

However, I can assure you that this is not an issue here. We do have a very efficient SIMS server and the workstations used to generate AM7 and Profiles Reports are also pretty high spec.

Could it be server and/or workstation issues that cause the slowness of your printing process?

[LosOjos]

I cannot offer any specific advice in speeding up your printing.

However, I can assure you that this is not an issue here. We do have a very efficient SIMS server and the workstations used to generate AM7 and Profiles Reports are also pretty high spec.

Could it be server and/or workstation issues that cause the slowness of your printing process?

 

I'm thinking machine spec may be a contributing factor to it (it's the actual generation of the files as opposed to the printing that takes time), as my boss' machine generates them ever so slightly faster (but they still take about 8 minutes each).

 

However, I still think that there is some serious issue with the efficiency of the system: it should not take a 3.00Ghz Dual Core PC with 1GB of RAM 10 minutes to perform a single mail merge! And in fact it doesn't take anywhere near that long if I do perform a mail merge based on a spreadsheet containing all the data I need from SIMS.

 

If I could find a way of bulk uploading them to students linked documents, I'd ditch individual reports in favour of a Word mail merge as it's infinitely quicker, easier and less prone to random template corruption... unfortunately I don't though

 

 

EDIT: I just thought I should add (before Sivadam get's angry!) that I'm not slating SIMS, I'm fully prepared to accept the problem may not be with SIMS itself but rather our environment, however until I can prove otherwise, it appears that the way SIMS generates reports is very inefficient...

Edited April 1, 2011 by LosOjos

[PhilNeal]

Please log a call - it shouldn't take that long.

[LosOjos]

Please log a call - it shouldn't take that long.

 

Hi Phil, we receive support from a local support team, should I log a call with them (who will pass it on to Capita) or with Capita directly?

[Sivadam]

...EDIT: I just thought I should add (before Sivadam get's angry!) that I'm not slating SIMS, I'm fully prepared to accept the problem may not be with SIMS itself but rather our environment, however until I can prove otherwise, it appears that the way SIMS generates reports is very inefficient...

As if I would?

 

And as I said on another thread (the comment has now been removed), I have a lot of respect for you, and it was obvious from the post that you were not knocking SIMS - just expressing frustration that something was not working as you would expect it to!

 

I don't think I have ever got angry on here anyway! Those that think so don't realise how calm I am when I respond! (Notice how I have managed to get rid of that last Green Square and gain two Red ones! Whoopee! )

Edited April 1, 2011 by Sivadam

[LosOjos]

As if I would?

 

And as I said on another thread (the comment has now been removed), I have a lot of respect for you, and it was obvious from the post that you were not knocking SIMS - just expressing frustration that something was not working as you would expect it to!

 

I don't think I have ever got angry on here anyway! Those that think so don't realise how calm I am when I respond! (Notice how I have managed to get rid of that last Green Square and gain two Red ones! Whoopee! )

 

It was meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek; you can't deny the fact that EduGeek regulars await your "heated" response to any post that appears to slate SIMS lol

 

Eager not to let this thread veer too far off topic, so I'm going to log a call with local support team and see what they have to say, in the meantime I'm going to try and find a quicker machine to run them on, see how much difference that makes....

[Sivadam]

I realised that you were 'tongue in cheek' - and my comments were aimed at others as much as yourself! Can't keep my audience disappointed can I?

 

Good Luck with the problem!

I hope it is soon sorted for you.

Keep us informed as others have reported this as well!

Edited April 1, 2011 by Sivadam

[PhilNeal]

You will need to go through your support team.

[alexsanger]

How are your server resources? This sort of thing started happening after upgrading our ancient SIMS server to SQL2008 - many stressed office staff, a meeting with Business Mgr and LEA support team = shiny new server :-) and everyone happy.

[LosOjos]

How are your server resources? This sort of thing started happening after upgrading our ancient SIMS server to SQL2008 - many stressed office staff, a meeting with Business Mgr and LEA support team = shiny new server :-) and everyone happy.

 

We had a brand new server installed over summer and it has definitely improved things a lot. SIMS generally runs quite quickly, it's only when you start running large reports or individual reports that it grinds to a halt. I'll wait and see what the support team say, but I'm not holding out much hope for a resolution

 

Now I wonder how hard it would be to write a program to batch upload to SIMS DMS?

 

Don't suppose anybody knows if there is a SIMS "Business Object" that I should be looking at for that?

[PhilNeal]

If your local team solve the problem then drop me an email.

[Steven_Cleaver]

We have had similiar issue with individual reports, if you have images as in logo's in your reports these can sometimes make the reports a bit large, you could try compressing the images this seemed to work here as reduced each report from 2.3 mb to about 730 kb, you could also try exporting them instead of printing them and then do file print and multiple select from word as it were only ever really had this issue with the SIM's Individual reports .

[LosOjos]

We have had similiar issue with individual reports, if you have images as in logo's in your reports these can sometimes make the reports a bit large, you could try compressing the images this seemed to work here as reduced each report from 2.3 mb to about 730 kb, you could also try exporting them instead of printing them and then do file print and multiple select from word as it were only ever really had this issue with the SIM's Individual reports .

 

Thanks for the reply, I have already compressed the images (a small school logo on each page, only about 15k per image) and I am exporting them ready to print (no choice, when it takes 24 hours to run off a year group it's difficult to plan exactly when to free up the printer!)

[vikpaw]

If your local team solve the problem then drop me an email.

 

Do let us know too

 

I was going to suggest the same things as Steven did.

 

A couple of other things, that may not make any difference, but check on memory usage on the PC at the time of run, is it going crazy, or perhaps there is some other process conflicting?

 

Try running it directly on the server, i've done that a few times, and it at least frees up the workstation.

 

I'm sure i've had someone fix this by simply recreating the template from scratch, and copy pasting the original data into it. Save, verify, save etc. and it seemed to work a little better, not sure why though. However, Word tables can be mashed up. Maybe one of the tags is broken but it still runs, just slower....

 

Try it on a broken down version of the template, with half as many pages, to see if it takes 4-5 mins instead. Maybe one half runs quicker...?

 

i don't suppose it co-incides with any other changes, such as change to server OS, client OS, version of office..?

 

A batch uploader would be great, and i'm sure there is a business object for it, but no-one is allowed to know about it, shh

[steve]

We've noticed speed issues when using PCs with Win 7 / Office 2010. If we revert back to an old laptop (lower spec) with XP and office 2003, the reports generate much faster.

[NorthernSands]

I used to have individual reports that took an age and a day, but they had graphs in. As soon as I removed the graphs they were considerably quicker.

 

Still, as Vik says, check to see what your workstation is doing when you run the reports. When something is running slow it's always useful to find the 'bottle-neck'. Bring up TaskManager and monitor the LAN, CPU and RAM usage over the time it takes to produce a few students' reports. If you can RDP to the SIMS server, bring the same up on there. If the RAM usage goes up to near max, also check for Page / Hard Faults for Winword or Pulsar. This means it's having to dive to the pagefile on the HDD to find stuff and that will be SLOOOOOW (the pagefile can be well over 100 times slower than RAM).

 

You don't say what type of CPU, nor what OS you're running on the workstation. If a P4 based CPU running Windows 7, or Vista, then yes, I'd expect it to take that long. If I'm absolutley honest, 1GB of RAM is not enough regardless of OS or CPU. 2GB on Windows XP or 4GB on Vista / 7 is where you'll want to be, in an ideal world. Preventing programs using the pagefile is usually far more beneficial that a faster CPU (unless it's a P4 based CPU, then that should be in the bin IMHO).

 

Let us know the results of the above tests.

[RichSpriggs]

If your reports are taking awhile to run or load up, you can try some of the steps below which may speed things up...

 

You clean out the SIMStempRPT folder which is located within My Documents. You can delete all the contents as this will be recreated when running another report.

 

You can re-import reports via Reports - Import (within SIMS) and chose the latest version of reports for you to import.

 

Or it could simply be the report your trying to run needs a filter or more filters to break down the amount of information. This can be done by editing the report in design mode.

 

If you need further information, don't heistate to contact me.

[NorthernSands]

@RichSpriggs - I believe the OP is referring to Individual Reports from [Focus > Assessment > Individual Report], rather than reports run from [Reports > Run Reports].

 

However, useful stuff for when those reports aren't running well.

[vikpaw]

@RichSpriggs

[LosOjos]

@RichSpriggs - thanks for your advice, however I am referring to Individual Reports as @NorthernSands said

[ec94210]

I must mention at this point that the time taken for the individual reports to run in assessment in our case has nothing to do with the workstation/server specifications. This is a major fault that Capita need to fix. Considering I have tested these slow reports on a server with dual E5540 processors and 48GB of RAM this is far from the issue!

 

The "problem" here is schools are reusing previous reports year on year and I assume by reusing these reports after various Capita SIMS upgrades where the data has been moved about, fields added etc is in fact more of a timeout issue. In most cases by completely recreating the report from scratch it runs in a matter of seconds.

 

This is 100% a Capita issue and needs to be fixed. A look on SupportNet will show that loads of other people are having exactly the same issue with one comment being "we just have to put up with it". This is not good enough and something needs to be done about this issue.

 

Many of our schools are very glad we are going out to tender for another MIS.

 

Hopefully Phil Neal will listen and get someone in development to actually look into the issue rather than tell us "It shouldn't take that long". Correct, it shouldn't but it does for a lot of SIMS.NET users.

[PhilNeal]

As mentioned earlier in this thread, if you'd like to make contact with me I will get an expert to contact you and if necessary visit to find ot more.

[Sivadam]

ec94210,

 

I do not agree that there is a generic problem with the printing of AM7 Individual Reports. Or it just does not manifest itself on our system!

We have been printing them very successfully for many years, since AM6 days, without suffering speed issues. This includes using previous reports year on year, though the Template always has to be edited anyway to account for the changes that need to be made to the different results sets required for each new reorting period.

 

Recently we have moved to a new style of reports that contain much more graphical information, such as English and Maths progress graphs, with Achievement plotted against Targets over a Key Stage.

This has obviously slowed the printing down somewhat, so that we now print a Reg Group at a time rather than a full Year group. However we are satisfied with the time it takes to produce each set of reports.

Edited May 27, 2011 by Sivadam

[vikpaw]

The "problem" here is schools are reusing previous reports year on year and I assume by reusing these reports after various Capita SIMS upgrades where the data has been moved about, fields added etc is in fact more of a timeout issue. In most cases by completely recreating the report from scratch it runs in a matter of seconds.

 

I'm pretty sure many of the affected users have tried recreating a brand new report, but even so, if it's worked for you that's great. How many times have you been successful? I'd be interested to hear from others if this does work...

 

There are a lot of issues recently, and it does need looking at, however, we found that the issues were mostly, OS and permissions based and fixing those has allowed the usual speed of running reports, though in general SIMS does appear to be quite slow on 2008. Nonetheless if you have a potential workaround even if it is a full recreation of the report that's promising for those of us that just want the job done now.

 

Did you find that a verify would fail on your old reports, or do you think it might be the built-in tags that were to blame..