Performace Impact

[RandyK]

What sort of things would impact the performance of the updating process in
MSPS 2003? We are experiencing latency issues that many times cause project
owners to get timed out during the update process.

We currently have about 1020 projects from 1 task line up to 4900 task
lines.

On the application server, the disk space is sufficient and our processor
speed and RAM are well above Microsoft's minimum requirements.

Could this latency issues be attributed to the SQL server? (which is a whole
different server than the Application Server)?

Any suggestions or comments that might help us understand performance better?

 

[NZ Projects]

High Latency between the client/server app/sql will certainly cause issues.
Any latency over 30ms will start to degrade performance.

 

[RandyK]

Thanks for the response... can you please expand on what you mean by "latency
over 30ms will start to degrade performance"?

Randy

 

[Ben Howard]

The issue is that Project Server 2003 was only designed to run in a LAN
environment, as the Pro client opens an ODBC connection to the SQL database.
ODBC is a very chatty protocol that was never designed to run in WAN env,
therefore anything with a high latency causes perf issues. You can get
various tools to measure the latency, or ping will give you an indication.

 

[RandyK]

I would assume then that MSPS 2007 is an improvement because it exploits a
cached environment (though it still uses ODBC protocol), right?

 

[Ben Howard]

Hi Randy,
P2007 makes several improvements, including the fact that
1. It uses the cache as you rightly say
2. It only downloads and uploads changes to any project
3. It doesn't use ODBC

I was with a customer today using P2007 over a WAN and it worked great, as
did WSS.