SageForum for UK versions of Sage 50- Help and support.

Our office is running sage line 50 v19, accessed by 5 users. Lately we notice that access to sage is painfully slow. I'm not sure if it's been getting progressively worse, or just we can't tolerate it anymore (we've got 4 people using it for input & output pretty constantly for 8 hours a day)! So I'm looking at the hardware and network setup to try and improve things, and I could do with some advice.

The sage 'server' has ok hardware by desktop standards (2.3ghz dual core processor a couple of years old, 3gb ram, 7200rpm hard drive), and is running windows xp (I'm not sure why xp is on there!). Client machines are running a mix of windows os from xp to win 7.

Networking is done by sharing the ACCDATA folder on the network, with all pcs on the same workgroup. I believe that's the approved method. Connection wise, everything is connected to a main network switch (or, in some cases, indirectly through another switch) which then goes to a router. The switch is not a smart switch.

The speed issue only seems to be when connecting over the network. When running reports or transactions directly on the server machine it's nice and fast. So you'd think it was a network issue, rather than a data access or processing issue. However when I connected another pc directly to the sage pc to create an ad-hoc network, disabling all firewalls and antivirus on both machines, the speed issue is there again. Both pcs have gigabit ports. Given that the connection was direct, I'm not sure what other network changes I could do to speed it up, so I'm a bit stumped now.

I'm sure it's advisable to connect everything directly to a main switch, rather than via an intermediate switch. Might this help? I'm running into a passive switch into a router, or would I be better with an active switch?

I've been talking to some companies about getting a better server machine. One company has quoted me about £5k for a machine with the following spec:
HP ProLiant ML350E Gen8 with 2 quad core 2.4 GHz processors, 32GB ram, 4 x Gigabit Ethernet, 15000 rpm hard drive

Is this spec a bit overkill for running sage across 5 users?

Another company quoted a much more manageable price for this:
HP ProLiant ML350p Gen8 , 16GB ram, 4 x Gigabit Ethernet, 10000 rpm hard drive

Is this sufficient?

Is there anything else we can try, like data consolidation or something?

Sorry about the long post, but any ideas or suggestions?

To get top notch performance from Sage run it on a terminal server, this eliminates the network bottleneck.

I would get the best out of what you have and if that doesn't work, move to a terminal server environment.

In your mixed environment you need to ensure that SMB2 is disabled on all machines.
As soon as you are all W7+ you an enable on all machines.

You should not be sharing ACCDATA you should be sharing the parent of ACCDATA or higher

File serving has very low demands on a server, you need to focus on networking as this is the primary bottle neck, no point in having a 200mph Ferrari if your road limits you to 30mph

If you have gigabit networking and it is working properly even an old P2 xp machine should be able to fill the gigabit.

You want to use Mapped Drives not UNC paths... in most cases
You want to configure your antivirus properly to minimise overhead
You want to clear down your audit trail at year and compress files. There is a year end guide on the support site for this.
You want Gigabit networking that works, and is not flaky.

You DO NOT want Microsoft SBS servers (They are no longer supported with the latest version)

If you want Terminal server environment, you do not have to buy your own, for £2340 per year, you can have a 5 user hosted system from Sage, this is all up includes sagecover, hardware, everything except your internet connection. (I can organise a trial if you are interest, you can restore data and try it out)

The other thought would be see if there is any opportunity to automate and get rid of some of the data entry, link systems up?

A bit late I know but it may help...

You definitely want to run in a terminal services setup, but that doesn't necessarily mean investing in "proper" Terminal Server. You can run multiple sessions on a Windows 7 desktop with appropriate software. I have a client that has 20 users on a Windows 7 PC running Winconnect software. The machine has a pair of SSDs (one for the C: drive and one for data) and it flies along. The network is only 100Mbit. It doesn't have to be fast for Remote Desktop.

The other advantage of this structure is that it is much more resilient and less susceptible to data corruption. Connected sessions can be disconnected (or users PC's crash/reboot) without affecting Sage, even if in the middle of an update.

Winconnect operates out of China and is not obliged to inform users of their products if they are breaking any licensing terms.

You don't need to pay a Chinese company hundreds of dollars to break Microsofts licensing terms, you can do that for free (google it).

The question is, do you want to?