Hello, I’m wondering if the performance of my Client Manager Batch queries are where they should be, in terms of speed or if I may have some bottlenecks I need to investigate.
My client files reside on a NAS at the office. Client Manager Server runs on one of the machines in the office. It has an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 5650GE Processor (3.40 GHz, up to 4.40 GHz with Max Boost, 6 Cores, 12 Threads, 16 MB Cache) and 16 GB DDR4 3200MHz. I re-indexed about 5 days ago.
I’m using Client Manager on another machine in the office, which has the same specs as the one hosting Client Manager Server. The NAS and all workstations are hardwired. No wifi.
My Client Manger Batch is composed of 9 fields: street, city, postal_code, gender, age, etc. Basic customer demographics type fields. I export to Excel. It’s set to ‘Calculate Only’. The checkbox for ‘Save file after recalculating’ is not checked.
As the batch runs, I see it needs to process 5,200 records out of a possible 53,000. It takes 55-65 minutes to complete that operation and save the results to a file.
Wondering if that seems about right for how long it takes, or if there are steps I
could do to speed things up a little.
Might be limited by your LAN speed and how many hosts are connected on the same segment. 100 Mbit LAN with 10 or more devices connected gets quite bogged down just due to collisions (assuming standard TCP/IP).
Does it run any faster on the machine hosting the Client Manager server?
Hi Nezzer, I’ve tested it on the machine hosting the Client Manager server and the results are nearly identical. In both instances, I tested it after hours where I was the only user in the office. I may just have to accept that these won’t be speedy queries.
Well, that rules out ONE thing. But, if your files reside on an NAS drive which is not the same device running the Client Manager server, you might still have a network issue.
When nobody else is in the office, that may reduce the network traffic, but the computers and printers and security cameras and other devices all remain connected to the network, unless you power them off. As long as they are powered on, they are polling the network, and collisions occur constantly (except for some higher priced network cards that are capable of powering off when not in use - i.e. when Windows is in Sleep mode).
With less than 10 devices on a 100 megabit LAN, the network lag due to collisions should not be noticeable, but the amount of lag goes up exponentially with the number of devices connected (unless you have a sophisticated router that allows you to set up segmentation).
There are free utilities to test your network speed (or you can just send a single huge file from one computer to another and time it). If other network traffic isn’t affected, you can rule out the network as the problem. Then focus on TaxCycle server settings, etc.
If you rule out the LAN as a problem, here is some comparative info:
I have my TaxCycle files on the same device as the Client Manager (i.e. one computer on the network) - a Dell Precision tower 3620 (circa 2018) running a Xeon E3-1280 v5 with 64 GB RAM, a SSD boot drive (where the Windows swap file exists), and a 4 TB Seagate Barracuda HDD where the TaxCycle files reside.
The entire TaxCycle database consists of about 2,500 index entries (much less than your 53,000). When I manually re-index the database, it takes about 3 minutes. When I run a search of any kind in the Client Manager, it takes less than 10 seconds. I haven’t tried saving search results to a file in the last year or two, but I can’t imagine that would account for a lot of extra time.
That’s a lot of useful information, so thanks a lot for following up, especially the server settings screenshot. I do remember seeing the same message as what I see in yours, regarding setting “Client Manager to run as a network user”. Since our files are on a NAS, it sounds like I should configure it that way. I’ll have to read up on Client Manager as a whole, as I’m very new to it and I wasn’t around when it was set up in the office.
