Slow processing and printing in Financial Reporter

It takes 50 minutes to do a departmental print on our income statement in Adagio. It takes far less time using ACCPAC 6.1a. I admit that we do have about 26 departments and many income and expense accounts, but still 50 minutes!

We imported the statement from ACCPAC and I had to make a few changes. Although I realize that Adagio allows for so much more formatting and the printout is much nicer - the time it takes is ridiculous. Is there something I could do or clean up to make it run any better?

FYI I'm using a Pentium III 733, or a Pentium 4 1.8Ghz. Server is Novell 5.1 and a Pentium III 1Ghz. Network cards/hubs are 10/100 BaseTX.

Hello bd,

Well, I agree that this is pretty slow, even with all the pretty formatting. You should be getting much faster performance than that!

Firstly, what is the performance like if you copy your g/l data to your local disk and run the statement from there? If there is a large speed improvement, you might find that your network is only running at 10MBits/sec rather than 100 because of a slow hub, or network card on the segment.

You should make sure you are running the current version of Ledger too V6.8B (20030131).

Finally, if all you did was convert your DOS specifications, then you are missing out on a lot of the features of Adagio's Financial Reporter. Delete the unused columns and all the named ranges. Replace any "generated rows" with a ".Range" command, and make the statement a ".SmartSheet".

Why not sign up for a web seminar on the designer?

If you're willing, feel free to e-mail me a backup of your Ledger and Financial Statements (use File | Backup) and I'll see what kind of performance we get here.

Hello bd,

Thanks for sending me the data so that we could check out the performance here.

After I deleted the hidden columns from the converted specification, printing out the complete set of statements for 33 departements took 7 seconds to generate the print job and a total of 1.25 minutes to complete on our HP8000 printer. This was printed off my local hard disk, not over our network. Over our 100Mbit network, the generation time went to 12 seconds. (I didn't bother printing out the set again.)

I've e-mailed you the specification I used.

Thanks for your help. The specification you fixed ran a little better but nowhere near your results. I'd be thrilled to get it down to seconds instead of minutes. So I will be taking a much closer look at our network. It is 10/100 and the computers and server show as at 100mbps. Just wondering what type of server did you test with? Ours is Novell 5.1 (has 768MB RAM) and the workstations are Win98SE and have 256MB RAM.

I understand that you can't run ACCPAC 6.1a on Windows 2000, how is Adagio?

I've lost my fax with the password for ALPTFP20030331, how can I get the password?

Thanks Again

Hello bd,

My workstation is a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 with 256MBytes of RAM. We have several servers, but the one used for the test was an NT Server with 512 MBytes (I think).

I think you will also see a big speed improvement if you install the upgrade. I believe that one of the two releases since your version had some improvements in that regard. But your comment that it was taking several minutes to save a specification indicates there is a problem. If you copy all your data to a local drive and run the program against the data there, is the performance significantly (>5x) faster? Again, this points to a network problem.

I'll have someone contact you from our customer service department about the password.

Adagio is a full 32-bit Windows product with no known issues running on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. We include a program called CHKSYS.EXE which is installed in the \softrak\system directory which makes sure your workstation and network are setup correctly for Adagio.

Network performance is critical, not just the 10 vs 100 cards, but also the hubs. It was taking over 7 minutes to recalculate a financial statement that took seconds in Plus. With the excellent support from Adagio, we ended up tracing the bottleneck to our 100mb hubs .. plugging the same workstations into a switch reduced the recalc time to 35 seconds. Not stellar, but certainly workable. Keep the switch vs hub issue in mind. Cheers!

Thanks for sharing your experience. I am currently doing experiments to investigate this.
On our network,we have 1 switch, 1 router and 4 hubs (all 10/100) but the servers and the workstations I've tried are not directly connected with the switch. Do you think it takes a direct connection?

Yes, the workstations on our system had to be directly plugged into the switch to get the faster performance. We are planning to replace more hubs with switched units in the very near future. Also check the settings on your LAN server ... we found our server was a bottleneck due to throttled-back settings there. Good luck!!