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mozerd
Light Will Pierce The Darkness
MVM
join:2004-04-23
Nepean, ON

2 edits

mozerd to thender

MVM

to thender

Re: Networking quickbooks - network quality.

said by thender:

I feel like point 1 will be difficult to achieve over network until, at the very least, it is achievable locally. Do you agree? Should I focus on making local search take less than 10 seconds for broad terms before dumping more into the network? Do you think that the chipset/CPU/memory/SSD I am using now is a bottleneck moreso than the 300 MB size of the company file & QB itself?

1.. 300MB is not a big DB --- as DB's go its rather small
2.. I suspect that ALL your Client systems are being bogged down by the Presentation layer which implies that your Graphics subsystem is not capable to keep up with your motherboard BUS and RAM Memory management subsystems --- So Yes TEST your QBE workstation first and optimize that to give you the very best response times. The Graphics system that provides the Presentation layer is where the biggest improvements can be made for client queries ---plus any other Client application running on the QBE workstation should be disabled to measure their impacts under LOAD. Once you have that figured out then move on to each Client workstation and test its GRAPHIC systems to see how the presentation layer is working. Under Windows 7 the built-in Tool called Windows Experience Index can provide you with very important clues where your real bottle necks are within that client computer.
3. The quality of the ROUTER and Switch does matter and GIGABIT does make a whopping difference. Real Time applications like VoIP must be put on a dedicated subnet [VLAN]. No workstation that requires access to QBE should have any application running that accesses REAL-TIME applications like VoIp or Video Streamming etc. There is a lot more.

Make sure to disable any security software running --- like antivirus, anti spyware, anti-anything else before you start testing. Once you have some results THEN start enabling your security software -- ONE application AT A TIME --- test the results and compare.

twizlar
I dont think so.
Premium Member
join:2003-12-24
Brantford, ON

twizlar

Premium Member

Sorry, but you really have no idea what you are talking about so just stop giving advice. 300mb IS big for a quickbooks database.

Quickbooks is a PIG, especially when it comes to searching on large database files. Are you using the SQL based version of enterprise? It is significantly faster than all of the flat file based versions.

Have you tried switching all of the clients into single user mode and then adding back one client in multi-user mode and seeing if that client performs better? Quickbooks has a weird problem when multiple clients are even associated with the multi-user server and can cause it to bog down completely.

Personally I have moved many companies OFF of quickbooks due to these very same issues. It is an inferior product performance wise once you get over 1-2 users, regardless of their claims about it being able to support up to however many users.

One other thing you can try is to re-load an old copy of the database from before you started seeing performance issues and see if it works fine with the current system. I would bet it works fine and that the main issue is that quickbooks simply blows once you have a certain number of transactions and objects in the database file. It isn't a hard set limit, seems to vary depending on how your customers and fields are associated.

mozerd
Light Will Pierce The Darkness
MVM
join:2004-04-23
Nepean, ON

mozerd

MVM

said by twizlar:

Sorry, but you really have no idea what you are talking about so just stop giving advice. 300mb IS big for a quickbooks database.

I Suggest that you spend some time learning about QuickBooks Enterprise. Download is free so you can experiment although that will not give you any feeling for loads and performance with a lot of users. Very nice product and very fast if properly installed on good systems -- workstations, server and network for up to 30 users. My experience with QBE is limited to a 15 user installation using a 800 GB SQL-DB which DB will be approaching 1 GB by spring of 2013. None of my users complain of performance issues so far.

thender
Screen tycoon
Premium Member
join:2009-01-01
Brooklyn, NY

1 edit

thender to mozerd

Premium Member

to mozerd
The thing is that no one is running reports or graphs of any kind on quickbooks. Literally,the only thing that causes a bottleneck is typing a customer name in the customer search box and hitting enter. The windows experience index on the main machine gets over 7 for everything, as it should for being a core i7 3.1 GHz processor, with 16 GB of cas 8 memory, and a z77 chipset, and it can still take 30 seconds for a search. I run reports on my machine regularly, and they run just fine, even the ones with pretty graphics. That's not a regular task, nor the one I am complaining about today. The workstations get 6s on the experience index and a 3.5 on graphics.

I decided to go out into the world and do some real research, since a lot of businesses that I sell parts to that are in the same business I am use quickbooks. Instead of continuing to dick around on my own setup I figured it would be worthwhile to try other setups. Most of my queries on this have lead to similar responses. I can't believe you have problems. Wow. We use QB for x, y, and z with h customer amount and it works perfectly fine. Then I walk over to their machine, and type chris into the customer search box, and hit enter, and one of two things has happened.

a) It loads the results in under five seconds, from their customer database of under 500 customers.

b) It takes 30-50 seconds like it does on my machine, with 12,000-28,000 customers, and they go "oh,we never do that. we just scroll to the name."

After this experience, I am inclined to believe that QB database performance just isn't that great when it comes to this particular issue: searching by a broad name for a customer. There must be another type of database, or you all are screwing with me. What I have learned thus far from this thread is that there are two different database types, an SQL version of quickbooks enterprise, and a flat file version, which has been excellent educational information. Given the idea that either the integrated NIC on the high end board, $180 16 port cisco switch, and core i7 setup I built are bad, or the difference in database types is the cause of my woes, I will take a guess it is the latter. I am ignorant and had no idea there were multiple database types for quickbooks, and this ignorance has cost me a lot of frustration. I am glad to have learned something from this thread!

So now I am going to research the different databases I can have in quickbooks and hopefully find something useful.

I am inclined to believe with twizlar. I am going to try what you suggest. I like QB because my CPA, who saves me tons of money, loves QB. Also since I am kind of stuck with it since I started using it two and a half years ago, and was stuck with it before I knew it was crap. It would be a nightmare to stop the synchronization process of orders from so many different venues, figure out which were posted & which weren't and migrate to new software at this point.

mozerd
Light Will Pierce The Darkness
MVM
join:2004-04-23
Nepean, ON

1 edit

mozerd

MVM

Click for full size
Windows Experience Index
said by thender:

The workstations get 6s on the experience index and a 3.5 on graphics.

Your Windows Experience Index for the Workstation -- once computed -- will be the lowest number it finds -- so the bottleneck on the workstation is the Graphics system.

When you install the Enterprise edition it offers a number of options -- I suggest that QBE act only as a HOST in a Client/Server environment where the SQL-DB version plays an important role.

From reading your commentary you need to find someone local that understands how client/server works and how to best install QBE for and in your situation.