We have been experiencing the problem that adding items to a PO is taking a really long time. Minutes I should say. Last thing we tried was a db reindex and that seemed to have worked for at least two weeks. Our volume is not too high to bring the system down to the point that it asks if we want to force close the POS. What could it be??
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Hi Michael,
your suggestion of a special area of discussion for this makes sense. However, to have higher powered devices in our locations is not economically feasible for us. The Microsoft partner that provided us with the product initially stated that RMS was a low consumption software which could be run even from an XP workstation. We do have a server which handles HQ but on a store level we only have backoffice workstations, regular workstations. All with different specs and all carrying the same load. They all act the same way though. Having said this, I would still find interesting to see what are the standard requirements to run RMS efficiently according to others equipment listings.
Thanks again
Well for one, you should really get full SQL, STD or Enterprise so you can add and use more RAM for the SQL queries. Express can only use 4GB. We should discuss this more with the others in this thread to see that they are using, because I would suppose that some if them are using full SQL and amped-out servers, separate Application and SQL Servers, etc.
Whatever everyone is using, I think this issue must have a lot to do with SQL and HW performance. We have customers with over 250K items that do not have this issue.
Likewise if you are running Windows or WServer 32-Bit, you are limited to using 4GB RAM for general processing too, and as you know much of this is used up by the OS and other processes and services running.
I see. In three years we have gathered 30,000 items which means an average of 90,000 in three more years. I am already looking for alternatives one of them a custom built web based POS which started as a catalog builder for RMS and kept growing. Had I known though, our decision would have been different. THanks for the tips! Cheers Dan
Your point 2, Dan, has been an issue for ever. When we start a POS, we do an immediate Lookup to load the Items (or in SOM, an Edit Items); we can then do a very fast Lookup for the rest of the session. If we forget to do it, the time taken to do the first Lookup, as you say, increases according to the length of the session so far.
Incidentally, we exit each POS every night to clear up any offline transactions.
I'm not surprised that Microsoft hasn't addressed this issue: it's only significant on larger databases for which RMS is not a realistic solution. Our single-store database has about 150,000 active items and RMS struggles in many ways.
There have been a few things I have noticed while trying to solve this most notably these two:
1. The whole Anti-Virus issue. SQL must be excluded from the Ant-Virus file reading/software scanning
2. The time it takes to bring up the dialog box to add items to the PO increases with the time the whole computer is running. For example, it takes an average of 6 seconds for the dialog box to come up after a full POS workstation restart. If the workstation/POS is left on for 2 days, the time increases to an average of 24. I believe is a software memory issue. Either that or a cache file of some sort that eats up the memory. Surprised Microsoft hasnt done anything about this.
This has been an issue for the last 8 years at least. The time taken to populate the 'Add Items' list should be faster than the Supplier 'Items Supplied' list (because the latter shows Inactive Items). It is, however, considerably slower. It's a fundamental design problem in RMS.
Don't worry, the SQL 2005 Express to SQL 2008 Express upgrade is very straightforward, just backup RMS DB first, install SQL 2008 Express, and set up with that DB.
I am not an implementation person, mainly the User Interface between our Tech guys and the Customers, but have to know about the capabilities and process enough to set up proposals and write up the project outlines, so I can't tell you all of the exact steps from memory. But I'm sure there is a doc with all of that, like settings in SQL to prep like named pipes and rowsets and stuff, or someone here will send you.
But yeah it definitely has to partly to do with SQL and HW processing performance. But even if you upgrade your HW, unless you are switching to SQL Std or higher instead of Express, your SQL functions and queries will not be able to utilize much more RAM and processing cores than with 2005 Express. It's worth a shot first tho since it's free.
There were also fixes put in after FP1 for exactly your issue since there were a lot of complaints, do definitely run the rest of your RMS updates too.
Not quite sure! I was notified by employees after a while I guess but it might have indeed started like you said, right when FP1 was installed. It just keeps getting worse and worse.. Nothing has helped. I have found a few ways to improve the performance of SQL which I will try. I also need to upgrade 2005 which I feel reluctant of doing since the whole system seems to have a sign that reads "fragile" all over.
Well, ever since FP1 this was brought up as an issue, since the Purchasing Intelligence window on the PO runs a full SQL query thru the whole DB to bring up that data. Did you notice this right after running FP1?
Michael - We are running 2005 express and yes, we are using HQ. Any idea what it could be? we have approximately 30,000 items.
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