Sage on high(er) latency WAN

[aldi]

Anyone got any experience of running Sage Line 50 locally with the data on a drive mapped via an ADSL&VPN link? The latency seems to be absolutley murdering the performance, i.e. 3 mins to a login prompt.

At least, that seems to be what's happening. I'm seeing 80-100ms out of hours and 100-220ms during the day, the VPN w. compression seems to be adding about 20ms. The quantity of data its pulling through is quite low, if it was maxing the link out it would be done in like 25 seconds, but it just trickles through at 2-3KB/s. Straight file copy does max the link out.

Anyone been there, done that?

[TheExcession]

It's probably using XML...

[aldi]

I'm laughing on the inside

Pings are down to 70ms ish this morning and that seems to have knocked about a minute off the login time, so it just looks like whatever it's doing is hyper-sensitive to latency

[BliarOut]

RDP of some description is your friend

[timsta]

BliarOut said:

RDP of some description is your friend

There should be a few remote protocols open to you.

[aldi]

timsta said:

BliarOut said:

RDP of some description is your friend

There should be a few remote protocols open to you.

2K so no RDP - Someone else set him up with tightvnc but he says its crap - "only marginally faster than driving to the office and doing it there". Might give ultravnc a go with the fancy video driver biz, allways seems much better than tight.

[roadsweeper]

aldi said:

timsta said:

BliarOut said:

RDP of some description is your friend

There should be a few remote protocols open to you.

2K so no RDP - Someone else set him up with tightvnc but he says its crap - "only marginally faster than driving to the office and doing it there". Might give ultravnc a go with the fancy video driver biz, allways seems much better than tight.

Try Radmin as very efficient remote access tool. One of our clients uses it for Sage Line 50 work from home actually.

Edited by roadsweeper on Friday 27th October 13:44

[TheExcession]

aldi said:

timsta said:

BliarOut said:

RDP of some description is your friend

There should be a few remote protocols open to you.

2K so no RDP - Someone else set him up with tightvnc but he says its crap - "only marginally faster than driving to the office and doing it there". Might give ultravnc a go with the fancy video driver biz, allways seems much better than tight.

My experience with VNC, even using links that are sub 100ms, is that it's still pretty slow. It works ok on a LAN, but for a WAN if you can run the Client locally instead that is often a better solution.

Again, it depends, if your Client requires 10 exchanges with a Server just to do something then using VNC to operate a remote Client is probably going to be quicker.

If however your client has a light weight interface to the server then running it locally should be better.

It does seam strange though that it is running so slow. We had an SQL based Client Application developed by a bunch of Indians that ran reasonably well on the same LAN segement, once we put the Server in Australia andthe Client in London it took 45 seconds to log in and then a further 18 minutes to get the Application up and running on the screen.

When I looked into the code they had done no optimisation at all, and it seems they were quite happy to sit in India waiting 15 minutes for the first screen to load, because that's how long it took.

On optimising a lot of their SQL and even more of their Java - they were asking for the same configuration for some of the internal application queues every time they instantiated a new queue. I changed it to keep a copy of the queue configs locally, and if the required config wasn't in the local cache then and only then would it do the round trip to Australia to get the information.

After doing this the Application loaded in about 15 seconds, which was a bit of an improvemnt, it was still bloody crap at talking to the server though

Edited by TheExcession on Friday 27th October 15:19

[aldi]

TheExcession said:

aldi said:

timsta said:

BliarOut said:

RDP of some description is your friend

There should be a few remote protocols open to you.

2K so no RDP - Someone else set him up with tightvnc but he says its crap - "only marginally faster than driving to the office and doing it there". Might give ultravnc a go with the fancy video driver biz, allways seems much better than tight.

My experience with VNC, even using links that are sub 100ms, is that it's still pretty slow. It works ok on a LAN, but for a WAN if you can run the Client locally instead that is often a better solution.

Again, it depends, if your Client requires 10 exchanges with a Server just to do something then using VNC to operate a remote Client is probably going to be quicker.

If however your client has a light weight interface to the server then running it locally should be better.

It does seam strange though that it is running so slow. We had an SQL based Client Application developed by a bunch of Indians that ran reasonably well on the same LAN segement, once we put the Server in Australia andthe Client in London it took 45 seconds to log in and then a further 18 minutes to get the Application up and running on the screen.

When I looked into the code they had done no optimisation at all, and it seems they were quite happy to sit in India waiting 15 minutes for the first screen to load, because that's how long it took.

On optimising a lot of their SQL and even more of their Java - they were asking for the same configuration for some of the internal application queues every time they instantiated a new queue. I changed it to keep a copy of the queue configs locally, and if the required config wasn't in the local cache then and only then would it do the round trip to Australia to get the information.

After doing this the Application loaded in about 15 seconds, which was a bit of an improvemnt, it was still bloody crap at talking to the server though

Interesting. I guess sage is just serially randomly reading the odd few bytes here and there from the data, and taking a few hundred ms each time it wants to do it = 120 s+ to log in. Looking at whats happening at the server end it doesn't keep the files open so theres a few hundred ms extra per transaction too. it's their own homebrew flat-file type database though I think and sadly it's not open source (not that I'd have the time/skills to sort it anyway).

Edited by aldi on Friday 27th October 22:11

[rich1231]

aldi said:

Anyone got any experience of running Sage Line 50 locally with the data on a drive mapped via an ADSL&VPN link? The latency seems to be absolutley murdering the performance, i.e. 3 mins to a login prompt.

At least, that seems to be what's happening. I'm seeing 80-100ms out of hours and 100-220ms during the day, the VPN w. compression seems to be adding about 20ms. The quantity of data its pulling through is quite low, if it was maxing the link out it would be done in like 25 seconds, but it just trickles through at 2-3KB/s. Straight file copy does max the link out.

Anyone been there, done that?

I dont know what your budget is to fix this problem, but have you thought about a Wan accelerator?


PC Pro mag reviews one this month from www.riverbed.com.. and it seems to work wonders on issues that you are having.

[BliarOut]

The problem is Sage.... It's aged code that's never been properly optimised for WAN use. Some of their higher end products work ok over a WAN link but the Line 50 range is still very LANcentric.

[rich1231]

BliarOut said:

The problem is Sage.... It's aged code that's never been properly optimised for WAN use. Some of their higher end products work ok over a WAN link but the Line 50 range is still very LANcentric.

And the item above is designed to improve things if binning sage is not an issue

[BliarOut]

Can it get a quart in a pint pot? WAN latency is often an issue I need to work with/around.