I am also fairly confident that this organization IS outgrowing QuickBooks. However, I am using win9x machines to transfer to this server, and only able to see a few MB / second.... say 2 or 3 MB/sec (VIA FTP... eliminating Samba from the whole Picture). Samba is a little better than FTP speed wise, but not much. Win XP and FTP can transfer at 6-7,sometimes even 8 MB/sec. I swear I've checked everything. What could possibly be causing this.
-----Original Message----- From: CLIFFORD ILKAY [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, June 01, 2003 4:26 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Samba] Slow performance with QuickBooks At 02:25 PM 28/05/2003 -0500, Brandon Lederer wrote: >I have spent much of the day today researching performance tuning with >samba. I have tried everything that I can find out about how to make >performance faster. I checked disk performance with Bonnie, installed FTP >and tested a transfer that way, achieving 6-7 MB / second. about 30 seconds >for 150 MB file. I was finally able to achieve those speeds on a file >transfer to the server through samba. But QuickBooks is still just as slow >as it was. Its performance has not changed a bit. I am banging my head >against the wall on this. I am going nuts. Please Help. I doubt it has anything to do with Samba. Have you tried to run QB on a Windows file server on the same or similar hardware? I suspect what you are running up against is an architectural limitation of QB. Many low end databases have abysmal performance in a multiuser situation and I doubt QB is any different. If you instrument your network, say with Ethereal, you will probably find that there is an incredible amount of network traffic as QB clients hit the QB data file on your Samba server. QB does not use a client/server architecture so even the simplest queries ship large data sets across the wire to the clients. It isn't just data but indexes as well that gets sent back to the client. Add a good measure of badly implemented locking in the database and you have a recipe for molasses slow network performance. Microsoft Access is also notorious for sluggish performance when you have more than a handful of clients accessing a .mdb file across the network so the problem is hardly unique to QB. Windows apps tend to like using opportunistic locking to improve perceived performance but the problem with that is the potential for database corruption. If you turn op locks off, which is the safe thing to do, performance will suffer. Many small businesses run blissfully ignorant of how vulnerable their data is in products like QuickBooks and Simply Accounting and many of them are lucky most of the time. However, when things blow up with these low end products, and they do on occasion, they blow up pretty spectacularly, particularly with larger accounting data files. Assuming further testing proves that Samba, something specific to your server, a bad networking component such as a driver, card, cable, jack, or switch is not the culprit and you conclude that it is after all an architectural limitation, if you cannot live with the poor network performance of QuickBooks, you may want to consider an accounting application that is better designed. I'm evaluating SQL Ledger <http://www.sql-ledger.org> which is an Open Source client/server product. Regards, Clifford Ilkay Dinamis Corporation 3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419 Toronto, Ontario Canada M4N 3P6 Tel: 416-410-3326 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
