Major performance issues with MSPS 2007

[Dave in Raleigh]

We are trying to load our project schedule from Project Professional 2007 to
MSPS 2007. The schedule has about 35,000 lines, roughly 25,000 tasks. It
won't load on a dedicated server. We reduced the size to about 2500 total
lines, and it still struggles. What's up with that? Any ideas what we should
be looking for?

 

[Dharmesh Patel]

Hi Dave,

What is the Size of your farm and spec of the servers?

Regards,

Dharmesh

 

[Sean Hanson - R AND S PORTFOLIO]

It is not just number of tasks, more tasks multiplied by average
assignments per task multiplied by the average duration of the tasks.

Do you have a lot of resources on each task for a period longer than a
couple years. This creates a huge amount of time phased data.

Recommendation would be no more than 1000 tasks with 3000 total
assignments no longer than 18 months for really stable schedules.

So if you do not assign resources and the duration is a couple months
you can have many more tasks. 2500 is probably a maximum number of
tasks.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz]

Dave:

I disagree with Sean's very limited caps, we have clients who routinely
manage schedules in excess of 5000 tasks. So, the question is what are the
characteristics of the problem schedules that is causing the problem? This
could be file bloat, especially if these schedules were created from earlier
versions of Project or if the schedules contain bad or questionable data.
For instance, blank lines in schedule files cause problems, but there are
many other factors such as excessive time-phased data, as Sean suggests.
With very large files that follow best practice in structure, it is not
unreasonable to wait a minute or more for these to save, but it shouldn't
render the system useless. The numbers that you quote indicate that 30% of
the lines in these schedules are not tasks. How many of these are blank
lines? Are you assigning resources to summary tasks? Are you setting
dependencies on summary tasks? There are many factors that can affect
performance.

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Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
MSProjectExperts
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