External Linking

[kernock]

Hi All

Does anyone know how to speed up the external linking in v8.

I am using build v8.03 with external linking to an Access Database with a fixed table containing approx 800 products.

The linking is filling both mandataory and custom fields.

The problem is that to make amendments to the site takes an age ... as soon as I apply an update to a section, Actinic sits on the egg timer for about 15 minutes - am I doing something wrong?

Any help would be grately appreciated.

Julian

[Mike Hughes]

I have the same problem with V8 and this makes it completely unusable compared to the snappy reponse I get with V6 when doing the same thing.

Actinic are well aware of the problem but haven't, AFAIK, identified the cause yet. They are working on it though.

I've tried pretty much everything I can think of to bypass the problem without any luck. Hopefully it will be fixed soon as I really want to use some of the new features in V8 (and in my case things added in V7 as well).

Mike

[kernock]

External Linking

Thanks for the response.

For now then, I will have to make all mods to website with External Linking turned off and then turn linking back on when I am ready to upload.

This, I have found, does speed things up a little, but it is still a bit of a pain.

Julian

[Guidepost]

I am having the same problem - did you make any progress?

Thanks,

Rosalyn

[kernock]

Unfortunately not

Unfortunately not, althought it has improved very slightly, if I make major updates to the site - I either wait patiently or turn off external linking first and then re-enable it at the end.

Actinic - will this be sorted soon?

[Mike Hughes]

Actinic fixed whatever was causing the problems for me with external linking on 8.0.4 (if I remember correctly). I haven't run any tests since then but I would be disappointed if the problem came back again.

What version are you using?

Mike

[kernock]

I am running 8.05 - your quite right, actinic did improve performance slightly in 8.04 but it is still very slow.

When I compare it to the speed of our in house database solutions that I produce, actinic seems extremely slow.

We have about 1000 products with various additional variables added to them but on the whole its only straight text and pictures.

[Mike Hughes]

The change for me with 8.0.4 was dramatic with external linking being 30-50 times faster than before. In essence the performance hit from turning on/off external linking disappeared for me. I've just checked on 8.5.1 and it's still nice and nippy (both refreshing the external linking and moving between sections).

I have about 2,800 products linked in from an excel spreadsheet. I only have two fields linked though, the product ID and a stock control field to turn on/off product availability.

Mike

[Guidepost]

Hi,

I am using version 8.5.1.

I have around 3000 products, but link approx 20 fields - is this making the difference?

I have spoken to support, who have passed the problem on to the developers, so I presume that either there is more than one cause, or the problem has not been resolved.

Rosalyn

[Guidepost]

Any success with external linking?

Hi,

Is anyone successfully using V8 linked to an external Access database, with 3000+ products, and around 20 fields linked?


Thanks

[4children2enjoy]

External linking to Access works fine but slow

I am externally linking 19 fields on about 1,000 products to an Access database in 8.5.1. Works fine, but I have to turn off external linking to make anything other than simple changes to the design, as otherwise it is much too slow.

As recommended, I have stopped using my own variables in the external link mapping, but it hasn't speeded up.

I used the linking process in exactly the same way in v7, and it worked very fast.

[TraceyHand]

I used the linking process in exactly the same way in v7, and it worked very fast.

EVERYTHING about V8 is a million times slower than V7
If it were an employee, it'd probably have been sacked by now!

[anqi]

my solution

i had the same problem. and my solution is:

giving up external linking. use link table functionality offered by access. it also solved the problem that multi pcs can't share the same actiniccatalog.mdb.

as for user defined properties, i moved them to online database. if you'd like follow actinic's idea - offline database, you need convert them into UserDefinedProperties (maybe some other tables involved).

hope that helps.

[Jan]

use link table functionality offered by access, it also solved the problem that multi pcs can't share the same actiniccatalog.mdb.

This is a really dodgy thing to do because Actinic caches data in the program so if you have several machines accessing the db for update without a locking system in place, you may well run into problems.

Regards,

[anqi]

to cope with that, we have a kind of mechanism to ensure no more than 1 user is operating on the same table simultaneously.

i'm not sure if actinic has other mechanism preventing me from using access link tables, which is not likely, but might hault the whole system at some point. regularly backed up main database can rescure me whatsoever. i just can't wait for actinic upgrade to solve this problem.