I see about 40-45 pts/day, about 15 of which are new. I find myself waiting in front of the computer for between 4-10 seconds (yes, I have timed it) transitioning between tabs, such as past encounters, imported items etc. The Reminds tab in particular takes between 15-25 seconds to pop up. When you multiply that by the pt's a day I see and the number of times I click between tabs it is becomming maddening. This adds at a minimum an hour to two hours a day I am standing in front of the computer waiting. I have almost 5,000 pt's and have not yet been using AC for a year. I have a high end server (windows 2003)with a xenon chip, six workstations w XP pro Lenovo 1 gig ram each, and we are hard wired network. Is this just a function of Access or the mass of material I have already accumulated? IS there any solution? Will the eventual change to SQL make a difference. My backup is already about 30 gigs with imported items (lots of pictures). HELP!
OK, I am a bit confused. There are great recommendations on ICD-9 codes and favorites, but I don't see that in the question. I could be reading it wrong. If I am looking at the right place, the "Reminds" tab is not a tab but an icon that opens a window. This is different than the tabs across the top. To move between tabs, the lag should be less than a second, although this is still rather slow as it should be much less than that.
The times you are describing are WAY too long. There is DEFINITELY something wrong. It sounds more like a network issue than an AC issue. To troubleshoot, do the following:
If you have AC installed on each computer, change the path of your AC on any computer directly to the database on THAT computer. Set up that way, it should run fairly fast. Lightning fast compared to over the network. That will be YOUR fastest speed you can EVER get on your network. Accessing it from another server whether peer to peer or a client/server setup will always be slower. So, if that is much faster, then it is a networking issue (although slightly contradictory).
So to answer your questions, although I will need more information from you:
Yes SQL will speed up the network signifcantly. With SQL, the query will take place on the server rather than sending the entire demographics, visits, etc. to your client to read.
How much RAM on your server, although probably doesn't matter a lot. Are you using Cat6 or Cat5 cable.
And, the biggest question of all: The comptuers are probably all connected to the server via a switch or hub -- possibly the router. Are you using a switch or a hub. And, what is the speed of each? Basically, we need to know the speed of:
Your network cards
Your switch
Or, do you have a hub (hopefully not)
if so, throw it as far away as possible and get a switch.
Now, I have about 1/4 the patients you have. 5,000 patients translates to a much bigger demographics table, a much bigger visits table, a much bigger everything. While Access will accommodate 2 GBs, you will notice an appreciable slowdown in speed even when close to that. Again, the entire database you are querying has to traverse the network.
