Home Forums Discussions General Discussion occasional slowing (6.1.1)

I have noticed for months now that after doing a reboot of my "main" computer , where the AC database is, all the other computers running AC run very fast and smooth; then after about 3-5 days, some sort of "hiccup" occurs whereby everything within AC gets very slooowwww.... all I have to do is to reboot the "main" computer, then everything goes back to being fast again, at least for another 3-5 days. The main computer is a Dell PC less than a year old, and stays on all the time. I don't turn the "main" computer off at night in case I need to access remotely, and also because of the online backup scheduled for 1:00 AM. I have been repeating this cycle for months now. Does anyone else encounter this?? If so, is there a way to remedy it? Thanks.

Luis,

I have often seen this, and I would start with checking two resources: free memory and free disk space. Check your memory when the machine seems slow, and see how much free memory you have.

The other trick is to run a disk-defrag, and see if this improves performance. A mostly full disk will fragment, and then the disk I/O slows quickly.

There are several other things, but those are the easy and user-friendly ones.

Thank you, I will certainly look at both of those, although intuitively it would seem odd that free memory or HD space would change so appreciably every few days, then resolve with a simple reboot??

Hi Luis,

Yes, we ran into the same thing, from v5.?? thru 6.1.1. Same scenario, ours would typically occur at about 3:30 PM. Helped but not resolved by faster "Main" computer. Solved temporarily by rebooting.

We have been using v6.1.2 for 8 months, this has NOT been occurring on this version.

Have not had the time/need/courage to upgrade to v6.3.3 yet, so I cannot speak for that version.

Have you considered upgrading?

Gene

Yes, was considering it soon; I think that's certainly a reasonable route to try. Thank you!

With HD space it would be that the disk is mostly full already, and AC backups can eat disk quickly, leaving low space that is also fragmented.

What happens with memory and a database is that it starts out on disk, is read into memory and cached there as it is used, increasing in size until it hits the 1 GIG limit.

I would second the suggestion to upgrade, v6.1.1 has some know issues, but no software is perfect.

If you are concerned about the upgrade, you can PM me and we can run the upgrade on your data in one of our instances so that you can take a look at it before the upgrade is run on your network.

I would agree with the idea of upgrading to 6.3.3.

Also, Gene and Luis, are either of you using Updox? We have an odd issue with Updox that slows things down periodically.

Yes, I do use Updox, although so far Updox itself has been working fine, even when AC is running like a turtle.... what has been your updox issue?

We periodically experience just the type of slowing you describe. I discovered the following to be the cause:

The Updox connector runs on our server. It should use about 30-40mb of memory (per Updox support). Periodically, that number rises. We have seen it above 600mb at times. When it gets above 200 or so, all the computers using AC slow down.

I know this makes no sense; when I first noted it, no one in our office or at Updox could understand this, nor could they understand why it should slow AC. Everyone is now finally convinced because the problem is recurrent, and fixing it immediately fixes the slowing.

You can reboot the server, but it is much quicker to go to the Task Manager, stop the Updox connector process, and then restart it. This only takes a few seconds, and can be done while everyone else is still working. The increase in speed is instant.

I showed this to Tobin a year or so ago. I think I finally convinced him that it is real, and the source of our slowing. On the other hand, he had not seen it before, and while he offered to work on it, did not see it as a priority since no one else has reported it. We live with it because we only see things slow every few days, and can fix it in a few seconds.

So...the next time your system slows down, check the memory use of the Updox connector, and if it is high, restart it and see if it speeds things up. Please let me know one way or the other; I would like to get Tobin working on fixing it! Some people believe that there is no such thing as a "memory leak" but that is how I would describe this.

Thanks Jon....certainly making that change through Task Manager is much easier than re-booting our main computer, which takes AC out of commission for several minutes; I will check it out next time we slow down.

Luis

Actually could make quite a bit of sense. It could be a 'memory leak', or it could be that the program is holding something in memory that is no-longer needed, and can be cleared. I won't get into Java and 'garbage collection', but those are actually two different things.

I look forward to hearing what memory state you find in the task manager the next time things slow. The performance Tab will show CPU and memory trace, The processes Tab will show processes and allocated memory & current CPU; click the header to sort by memory.

Had a somewhat similar problem plus lots of hang ups and freezing especially when looking at imported items. Now a lot better after uninstalling then reinstalling Adobe Reader.

Update: this morning when I got into the office I notice a very mild, subtle degree of slowing; I checked and Updox connector was at 136 MB; I ended the process and restarted, and so far seems to have sped up, although the difference is small ....

Mike, I too have noticed that every once in a while adobe freezes up, and when it does I cannot view anything in the imported items, requiring a re-boot of the computer. Not sure exactly why this happens.....

FYI - One of the fixes that came after your current version was a fix to II(Imported Items) that offers significant improvements.

Luis,
136k is at the low end of what would cause problems for us, though it is clearly higher than Updox says is optimal. This may indicate that we are on to something. The key, of course, is checking it when you have serious slowing and looking for a significant speed boost when you restart the process.

Indy, thanks for providing some logic behind this.

@LuisP

The fix was to roll back to Adobe Reader 9.5 with the latest version if you have issues with II and maximizing the screen.

How much RAM do you have in the server?

I've had the problem with my server (main computer) slowing significantly after 2-3 days of on time with every version of AC I've used in the past 18 months. It might be due to the fact that I'm running the Updox connector on that computer as well. But I don't think it was Updox, as the server itself would run other programs as fast as usual, and I haven't seen any excessive memory usage. It was simply that connecting to AC was slow.

I found that restarting the AC SQL service would fix the problem. Rather than restarting my server every couple of days, I set up an automated task to restart the SQL service every morning at 3:00 am. Haven't had a slowdown since, and have only had to restart my server as required for system updates.