V8 dead slow with external linking

[Mike Hughes]

I've had problems in the past with V8 running incredibly slowly. Having investigated a bit more my experience points towards it being a problem with external linking. Here's what I see:

V6 - Link to an excel worksheet within a larger workbook. Opens in 6 Seconds

V8 - Link to an excel worksheet within a larger workbook. Opens in 39 minutes (repeatable)

V8 - Link to the same worksheet but now standalone. Opens in 3 minutes 20 seconds.

V8 - External linking disabled. opens in 40 seconds.

It's a very simple worksheet that I'm linking to. Less than 3,000 products with only two columns linked 'product reference' and 'stock checking enabled'.

Perhaps actinic would look into why V8 is almost 400 times slower than V6 in this scenario and why separating out the worksheet makes such a big difference.

Other's who find V8 to be slow might like to see if it's external linking that's causing the problem.

Mike

[Jan]

Is it possible that you had the excel sheet open when you opened V8? This makes it very slow.

Regards,

[Mike Hughes]

Hi Jan.

No, the excel spreadsheet was closed. I've learned to check that from experience with V6.

Mike

[Owen Drumm]

I have had problems exporting a snapshot with version 8. The site hasn't gone live yet so I am not panicking..................just yet!

[wjcampbe]

Owen,

What error message(s) do you get?

[Owen Drumm]

I didnt get any error message as it keeps on freezing. I phoned up technical support but the womoan didn't know what she was talking about to be frank. It seems Actinic has followed the trend and exported there technical support.

[Mike Hughes]

OK. Back to the external linking problem.

Strangely, what I thought was a fresh V8.0.1 installation has turned out to be an 8.0.0 re-install, so I've uninstalled that and installed V8.0.2.

Timings are a bit better than 8.0.0 but still way too long.

V8.0.2 - No external linking - 40 seconds for actinic to open.

V8.0.2 - Linked to single worksheet - 3 minutes to open

V8.0.2 - Linked to a worksheet as part of a larger spreadsheet - 19 minutes to open.

When it only takes V6 about 6 seconds to open with the worst case linking scenario then there's still something seriously wrong going on here.

Mike

[wjcampbe]

Mike

I can open any site in v8 in less than 5 seconds (no external linking). Do you have something else going on?

What A/V , Firewall, Anti-spyware etc might be affecting this on your PC?

[Mike Hughes]

Hi Bill,

I probably have the usual suspects running. Zonealarm firewall and AVG anti-virus. Nothing that should interfere really and nothing that causes a problem with V6.

I think I must have mistimed my V8.0.2 result above as it's still consistently taking 39 minutes to open using my normal spreadsheet. I've also tried deleting all orders and compacting the database but it still takes the same time.

I've now emailed the website and database to actinic support for them to look at. I've pretty much done what I can to investigate and they now need to check I'm not doing something I shouldn't and then get the development team involved to find the problem.

My Pc is an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ with 512MB RAM which while not state of the art should be up to the task of running this.

Mike

PS. Saving the snapshot for actinic support took a very long time (30-40 minutes, I didn't bother to time it) to save so Owens problem may be related (if he also uses external linking).

[Nadeem]

Mike,

Please could you double check if you have have ODBC Tracing switched on.

To check/stop the tracing:-

1.Open 'Control Panel'

2.Open (ODBC) Data Sources (also known as 'ODBC' or simply 'Data Sources').

3.Go to the 'Tracing' tab

4.Click 'Stop Tracing now'.

Just to double check, you never know

[Mike Hughes]

Hi Nadeem,

I eventually found this under control panel > administrative tools > data Sources (ODBC).

the only option under tracing was 'Start tracing Now' which I guess means it's not active.

Another thing I only just finished testing was illegal characters in my product reference field. I found that I had some " characters in a few of the data fields but i've removed these and it still took 39 minutes to open (just finished running).

Mike

[Nadeem]

Hi Mike,

Very strange, This really needs to be looked by Actinic Support. Have you been able to send your snapshot across?

Kind Regards

[Mike Hughes]

Yes, Emailed it to Robert Taylor around 11.00am this morning.

Support ticket is 89578.

Mike

[Mike Hughes]

Got a nonsensical reply this evening saying development are claiming it's the hardcoded site links in my site that are causing the problem. Personally I can't see any reason why that could cause this kind of behaviour and have sent it back.

I've already explained that the opening time depends on what kind of external database linking is used. The hardcoded links are a constant throughout so someone in development needs to put on their thinking cap.

Mike

[Jan]

Do you have any user defined properties defined, ie: customvars in the old world?

Regards,