ozydave

Sill experiencing the same issues as I was at the beginning. Done all the bits, index patches, shrink logs, archive attendance logs etc, basically everything parentpay say, MXDOP, reserving VM memory, just all sorts. The SIMS services manager does really take its toll. I'm at the end of my tether. Defo looking to move away from SIMS

Hi all, We’re currently using SAMpeople with Wonde write‑back into SIMS and have come across an issue with staff absences. When an absence is entered into SAMpeople, it successfully writes back into SIMS. However, our Cover Supervisor is unable to see the absence in SIMS. If the same absence is entered directly into SIMS, it appears correctly and the Cover Supervisor can see it without any problems. This suggests the write‑back is happening, but something isn’t quite right in how SIMS is presenting or flagging the absence for cover purposes. Just wondering: Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a known issue with Wonde write‑back and cover visibility? Are there specific absence codes or settings we should be checking? Any advice or similar experiences would be really appreciated.

Just curious, How many external companies do you share data with. Currently we have 64. Is that normal for an All though school (That I know about) Cheers

Yep, we archived all but the last 2 years & run the patches 20647 and 22573

Still very much an ongoing battle. ParentPay had a remote session, did a bit of poking around, and suggested disabling all third-party applications like Wonde, GroupCall, Edulink, and SIMS services manager for a few days to see if that helps. They recommended enabling them one by one to identify the resource hog. I wasn’t keen on being chased around the building by angry users with pitchforks, so I didn’t follow through with that. They also weren’t too thrilled about me running SQL statements on my own SQL server, even though it’s just for reporting on what the SQL server is doing and not altering the SIMS database in any way. Oh and maybe report the server!!!!! Wonde turned out to be a bit of a hog. I contacted them to ensure I was on a "default schedule, regular reporting." Wonde doesn’t do any writebacks for us. I’m pretty confident our server and SQL installation are in good health and configured correctly after setting MAXDOP to 4 and parallelism to 80. 7 CPUs seemed to be the sweet spot as well. We have a SIMS report that outputs to a CSV, and it takes up to three hours to run. The resulting CSV is only 1.09 MB in size, so it’s not an extensive report by any means. Clearly, something is off here. Even when kicking off the report at midnight when everyone’s tucked up in bed, it can still take three hours. I’m asking ParentPay if they’ll take the report and our database to see what they come up with. I’m not completely focusing on this report; it just stands out. We’ve had SIMS hangs and people getting kicked out even when this report isn’t running.

So, Reduced the CPU's to 7 last night. Users so far report it is much zipper. No one kicked out, small reports run ok. I plan to change MAXDOP tonight and see what tomorrow brings Attached are some base lines i uploaded to Grok AI (in case anyone is interested). Cheers for all your pointers SlowSIMS_Grok_report.pdf

So reduced the CPUs from 16 to 10 last night. Low and behold, today no one was kicked out and overall the users reported it as being 'better'. Going to drop it to 7 cpus tonight as @bjeffery suggested to gauge the effect.

I'll do this tonight ready for the morning. Be ready for a phone call 🙂

TempDB is 100mb, autogrowth is unlimited. SIMS just locked up yesterday morning, Random people kicked out, if users were still in SIMS none of the registers would load. Process monitor on the server showed nothing untoward. CPU sitting about 38%, RAM usage about 30% VMware vsphere performance graphs showed ruffly the same I'm done, holding up the white flag, given up. Handing it over the ParentPay now

Its already had my soul. I am a husk of my former self

@3s-gtech Our DB is 16GB

Yep my sql is in compatibility mode. @manatech it is a bit more zippy running things directly on the sims server

Recently moved sims to a new server 2022 on SQL 2022. Its a VM on vmware. Its has 50gb Ram and 16 CPUs allocated & vmxnet3 Ethernet Adapter 10GB Its slow, simple reports take a while. Users reported random crashes. I've run the patches 20647, 22573, archived attendance marks, run database diagnostics, validated memberships. Performance monitor on sims server itself runs about 30% CPU. Memory 38% VMware monitoring coincides, the actual vm host is not under any strain at all. Lots of research, iperf etc. AI suggest it could be down to the vmxnet3 Ethernet Adapter. (As below) Apparently it might be a know issue to vmware. My question is have you: Disabled Large Send Offload (LSO) & Disabled TSO (TCP segmentation offload)? To improve performance VMXNET3 with LSO enabled = known issue VMXNET3 + Windows Server 2019/2022 + LSO/TCP Offload on ESXi 7/8 frequently causes: Half-speed outbound throughput High CPU usage in vmxnet3 virtual NIC driver Choppy SQL response times Slow SMB and slow database transfers Zero NIC errors (stats remain clean), which matches your report VMware has published multiple KBs about this. The fix is always the same: ❗ Disable Large Send Offload (LSO) ❗ Disable TSO (TCP segmentation offload)

I have 80 2013 iMacs. 8gb ram, 1TB hard drive. Linux Mint goes on easy and runs really well. Any suggestions on what to do with them.

VERY poor show from juniper education Scaremongering. Had a letter from them saying we need to respond within "7 days of this letter" or we will implement the "Accessibility Compliance Package" For £249 +VAT (typically £499 + VAT) The date of the letter is at the very bottom in fairly small font. Clearly in the hope that many customers will not notice it.

Very disappointed with Inventry. Just renewed our contract with a system refresh. We have two sign in screens 1 in primary and 1 in secondary both with printers attached. They came out in October half term to do the refresh. The tech turned up with 1 screen to replace the main unit. I questioned about changing the one in primary and the printers. The "refresh" only included 1 screen and the "refresh" of the maintenance contract on the printers. The original system was installed 2018. Since the main screen was swapped out I have had to reboot the system 4 times as it had just hung. I contacted Inventry, apparently to replace the screen in primary would cost me £1200 but they would wave the £250 installation just this once. Really poor show. Would advice everyone not to renew

Did you every get a reliable fix for this?

Ill give it a go, but got a classroom of 30 PC's most of which have the problem. Might take a while :-( @ittech2342323 @kennysarmy

This is still driving me mad. Cannot seem to find anything that works consistently to clear the error. Uninstalling office and re-installing don't work. Deleting local profiles don't work The trick above moving the tokens, the problems return after a while, so don't work. I reimage the device again the problem returns after a while. what a pile of poo

Really poor show, a simple way to try and extract more money. Downgraded to basic just now after receiving the email

Sometimes where I work it feels like we are years behind :-)

Interesting...

I need to purchase a set of 30 new laptops. I got 510 Toshiba sat pros in 2013, many are still going strong. Takes about 1 minutes to change a keyboard, about 5 minutes to change a screen, hard drive and memory easy to get to. (lost count of the number of keyboards i have had to change) Any recommendations for laptops that are just as easy to fix 🤞 Cheers

A job vacancy is posted here https://www.mynewterm.com/jobs/135879/EDV-2023-AVA-75618 School in Aylesbury Bucks

How do, We have a load of new M1 macs that have OS versions 14. We have Mosyle MDM. I'm trying to block students access to the VPN settings/configuration in 'system settings' Anyone got any pointers on how to do it Cheers