Improving TSM Speed

Incident Description

TSM runs slowly.

Resolution

This typically manifests with a TSM Job Card taking a long time to activate. If the User Setup options for Job Centre or Visual Scheduler popping up on TSM startup are on, the speed issue may become apparent at startup. A combination of factors may affect the speed of TSM. This document lists the most common of these as well as suggested workarounds. Note: You may need the assistance of your IT personnel for network and anti-virus configuration.

Table Indexes

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TSM uses index files to speed up access to your TSM data. After a while, these index files can become less efficient or become corrupted. In addition, if your TSM data files contains many deleted records, this can also significantly impair performance. TSM has a utility to rebuild its index files and remove (pack) any deleted records. You should reindex your TSM data periodically with the pack and clear nulls option enabled. Note: The Pack option removes deleted data from TSM tables, meaning that it cannot be undeleted after that.

1. Have all TSM users log out and close down any external TSM processes such as the Accounting Post.. Go to the Utilities menu, Logged In Users option to check on their progress.

2. Go to the Utilities menu, Reindex option. Make sure all the check boxes are ticked and the “Pack and Clear Nulls” option is selected. Press “Ready to Reindex”.

3. Restart TSM.

Anti-Virus Software Antivirus software often has a “live scan” feature which checks new files as they are being created and opened. This may adversely affect TSM, as the TSM engine opens many files while it runs and the Anti-Virus software checks each file, slowing down TSM. We recommend that the antivirus running on your workstations and the server is set to exclude the TSM directory from live scanning (scheduled disk scans are still fine). You will most likely need to contact your IT technician and have them configure the antivirus in this way. Tip: Commonly the TSM directory on the server whose UNC path may be something like “\\server\progs\TSM” is mapped to a virtual drive destination on the workstations such as “T:\TSM” - we recommend that both the virtual drive and the UNC path be excluded from live scanning.

Network Performance For sites that run multiple TSM licenses over the network, it is recommended that a 1Gbit/s switch be used to network its workstations. Whilst this is not always necessary for good performance, as the size of the TSM database grows, the software may naturally slow down. One way around the issue is to improve network performance. It is most likely that your network machines are already equipped with 100Mbit/s network adapters. Replacing these with Gigabit adapters will further improve performance on these individual machines, whilst running TSM locally. Please consult the suggested specification document for further details.

Wireless Networking It is not recommended that TSM is run locally on a machine networked to the server wirelessly. Whilst technically this is certainly possible, the inherent instability of wi-fi connections may result in the occasional connection dropout. If this happens whilst the engine is committing data to the table, data corruption may result. Note: Even with the latest standard (IEEE 802.11n, not ratified at the time of writing), whilst the maximum connection speed possible is 300Mbit/s, the typical connection speed is 74Mbit/s, still lower than the 100Mbit/s wired connection.

Terminal Server We do not recommend running TSM over a wide area network as this will significantly reduce performance. Our preferred solution is to run TSM on Terminal Services (or similar) which provides the best possible TSM performance at the lowest per machine cost. For even better performance, host your directory on the Terminal Server box itself rather than accessing a separate server hosting TSM data files.

System Specifications Hardware has improved its performance remarkably over the last few years. However, we do recommend that you ensure that your equipment meets are system requirements. Contact TSM Support for our recommended hardware specification guide.

TSM Setup Options

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There are several TSM setup options that can impact on performance and should be disabled if they are not required.

1. Fast Text Search enables TSM to do quick and complex text lookups in tables. The Fast Text Search options specify fields on the Job Card table to be indexed for Fast Text Searching. This index is updated each time you save a job and does slow down performance a little as the size of your jobs database increases. If you do not use some of these fields or do not use Text searching at all then you can take them out of this comma-separated list and they will not be indexed, reducing the size of index files and potentially improving performance. Blanking out this list completely will disable Fast Text Searching. To access these settings, go to Utilities, Setup, Job Cards, Page 2.

Field Name	Location on the standard Job Card
servreques	Service Requested, bottom of the Job Logging Tab
workperf	Work Performed, top of the Job Details tab
billing	The Billing Address field on the front of the job card
jobnote	The memo screen that comes up when pressing the button at the bottom of the Job Card
note	The Audit Trail note that comes up when right-clicking on the button at the bottom of the Job Card.
sitenote	The text in the Site Note tab at the bottom of the Customer tab of the job card
Jobname	The Job Name on the Job logging tab

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2. In TSM, there is an option to resize text as the screen is resized. Disabling this option is likely to produce a slight increase in performance when loading TSM modules. The option is found under User options, so that it can be controlled at user level.

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3. The General Setup option for disabling the customised labels results in user-defined labels or foreign languages from being loaded. Specifically these are the labels that have been specified by Ctrl+Right Clicking on them and entering a new label or selecting a different language or region in the Setup region / language settings. If no field labels are re-defined in this way in your TSM, this feature can safely be disabled.

Latest TSM version

We are constantly striving to improve the performance of TSM in specific areas. Please ensure that you are always running the latest TSM version to ensure the best possible speed. If there is a specific area in TSM which is slow, contact our support department [email protected] with specific details of where it is slow and we will see if we can assist you.

Size of TSM tables

Although TSM makes heavy use of indexes, there can still be some slow down in parts of TSM when your table size gets very large (after many years of using TSM). The most direct way to address this would be by archiving and removing old TSM data that is no longer required. We recommend that you make a copy of your TSM directory before removing old data and use this to reference that information if you need to do so. Please contact the Proware office to discuss this procedure further.