New Boundary Support Forum / Prism Deploy 6 / General Discussion / Upgrade from v6 to v7 / Latest Posts

RE: Upgrade from v6 to v7

Niklas — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 07:07:00 GMT

The change in speed is tremendous after applying the fix.

Seems like a lot of GUI-problems disappeared as well, for the time being at least(problems with application reporting illegal actions on hidden controls).

Thanks for the patch-instructions, to bad we paniced and spent a whole lot of $$ on MSSQL instead of more Prism licenses ;-)

RE: Upgrade from v6 to v7

New Boundary Support — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 23:06:00 GMT

We have identified an issue with license packs that may contribute to the performance slowdown you see when moving between tabs. We plan to address this in a maintenance release. In the meantime, following the steps below should alleviate the problem.

1. Stop the Prism Server by right-clicking on the Channel Manager in the system tray.

2. Rename the folder "..\Prism Suite\License Packs" to something like "..\Prism Suite\License Packs OLD". (This prevents the evaluation license packs from being reinstalled after step 3.) Make sure you can locate your purchase license packs, because you will need to re-add them to the Channel in step 5 below.

3. Delete the registry DWORD value "HKLM\Software\Lanovation\Prism Deploy\Server Channels\\Data". (This deletes all installed license packs.)

4. Restart the Prism Server by using the Channel Manager.

5. Open the Console, go to File | Channel Properties, and re-add all of your purchased license packs.

6. After re-adding the license packs, give the clients time to poll the Channel. Within your Channel’s polling interval, all of your polling computers should again appear as Managed in the Console.

Please let us know the results!

RE: Upgrade from v6 to v7

Niklas — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 09:45:00 GMT

Follow up:
We just invested $$$ in SQL 2000 even though MSDE did not show obvious signs of the SQL govenor limting access more than occasionally. That happened from time to time with V6 as well. We moved our database from MSDE, ran maintenance on the DB and defragged the disk.

About 80% of the clients has been set to polling time 30 min, the rest of the clients are currently offline. When running as a single (console) user in the system performance is somewhat acceptable, but still slow compared to V6.03.

Otherwise we see no performance boost at all when we are 3-5 users logged in, and our server still has no load worth mentioning. After switching tabs between (for instance) "managed" and "configuration groups" there is still a delay which ranges from 30 seconds to minutes (you end up killing the task finally).

Data seems to be fetched in very small chunks, I see a constant data rate of approx 70kbps when moving between tabs.

I know you recommend a high polling time, but with v5 we ran with 1(!) minute without problems, with 6.03 we had 5 minutes without any problems.

30 minutes is way to high for us, but now we have at least changed it in order to track down our problem. Any further suggestions? Except more hardware now that software seems ruled out.. (current channel-/SQL Server is as I mentioned before a dual Xeon 2.4 GHz w 1 gb RAM and SCSI-disk)

RE: Upgrade from v6 to v7

New Boundary Support — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 23:30:00 GMT

We're sorry you're experiencing performance problems with your upgraded installation!

We can see three possible problems with your configuration that may be contributing to the performance slowdown on a 1000 PC Channel: using a polling frequency of 5 minutes, using MSDE instead of full SQL Server, and having Prism and MSDE running on the same box.

You are likely running into problems with the MSDE workload governor. Remember that MSDE is designed for small and relatively inactive databases. There are two ways to find out how often the workload governor is activated:

Use the DBCC CONCURRENCYVIOLATION statement to monitor how often the workload governor is activated. This will also give you an idea of how many active operations are being processed by the instance at the times the governor is active. Microsfoft SQL Books Online contains instructions for using this command: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/tsqlref/ts_dbcc_0cdq.asp
The Event Viewer on the SQL server shows frequent message type 3629.

Immediate recommendation: Change your polling frequency to 30 minutes. This is very easy to do with version 7 since the clients will automatically take their new settings when they poll.

Additional recommendations: Upgrade to SQL Server 2000. If you were to install SQL Server 2000 on a dedicated system and leave Prism Server on the existing system, you may be able to lower the polling frequency to something like 15 minutes.

NBT Technical Support staff will be out of the office on Monday, September 5 for the national Labor Day holiday. We will be back in touch with you on Tuesday with more detailed information and recommendations. Thanks for your patience!

Upgrade from v6 to v7

Niklas — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 03:55:00 GMT

We just upgraded or server to V7 (running the latest 6.x release earlier).

We have severe performance problems, much like those in v5 and later on in early v6. The upgrade feels like a real downgrade.

To be short:
Switching between the tabs "Managed" and "Configuration groups" takes minutes. Really, minutes, +60 seconds. Times two sometimes.

Everything was kind of OK with v6, even though it was no MSSQL-client that got a speeding ticket for running effecient quieries to often. So to speak.

We run MSDE (default) on a decent server (xeon, 1gb ram, scsi-disks, server does ONLY channel-stuff, no .PWC stored here) and it shows no signs of performance problems.

The v7 console is hardly useable if you need to switch views. Running the console in Vmware shows that when switching views the network interface is accessed constantly for a minute or two, but never peaks above 10kb/s.

For the record: 1000 LAN clients, polling time 5 min, single console user logged in and performance problems occur. Only two configuration groups exists.

We have already upgraded a couple of hundred clients, will these still work if we decide to reinstall the server and go back to V6?

For a beta this kind of performance would be acceptable I guess, but we are running v7 "live" now, and it is not beta. What gives?

/N