Hardware requirements

[Danforth]

Hi all,

My employer has recently moved to Sage 50 Professional. While I'm not the actual bookkeeper / accountant / Sage jockey, I am the go-to 1st line tech support guy so I'm registering here to read around, hopefully learn things, and ask questions if necessary.

The accountant's computer is the server where all the data is stored, the rest of us access it over the network. We've noticed that complicated data sorts (components by name, say, which number in the hundreds) are very slow indeed. This happens on the server as well as on client machines. We don't notice any slowdown doing anything else.

I'm going to investigate all the generic "speed up Windows" possibilities first; the question I want to put to you lot is, what specs does your server have? Sage's own recommendation is a 2 GHz processor and 4 GB of RAM for a 64-bit Windows install, which we exceed. But long years of experience with PCs has lead me to distrust the suppliers' own specs. I'm thinking adding more memory would be a quick and easy boost, but before I go shopping, what does *your* Sage install run on?

Alternatively if you think I'm barking up the wrong tree, do chip in!

[brucedenney]

It is unclear what your issue is.

You say "Complicated Data Sorts" but it is unclear what that means can you be more specific?

Sage 50 has not great performance from it's back end database.

The ODBC drivers are even worse.

Sage runs on all sorts of hardware and it performs better on better hardware, I run 8 processors with 16Gig of Ram and a solid state disk on my work PC and it goes much faster than most users, however, I also have clients who run it on celeron powered laptops with slow disks, the relative speed of things is not easy to measure.

Martin over at Adept has written a "Health Check" tool for Sage 50 that can give you an idea of relative performance.
http://www.adeptcom.co.uk/L50hc.htm

[Danforth]

Thanks for the tip on the Adept health check, I'll run that when I get a minute.

An example of the slowdown in action: if I'n in Sage 50 Pro, Products and Services section, looking at Price List. This list has around 300 items in. If I click a column heading, to sort alphabetically say, Sage is very slow (15 seconds) to complete the action. This has been observed on the host machine with the company data, and also on a client (mine).

I notice just now that second and subsequent sorts by column are faster, so I'm wondering if it's some initial indexing or other that's slowing things down (like how Windows indexes files to speed up future searches).

I don't think any harm can come of a few extra gigs of memory so I will probably try that too.