Progress Clients performance issues

[taberj]

Hello all.

I'm new to this forum. I've been supporting a customer that has a product by Sage Software called Intergy EHR.

It uses a Progress database (OpenEdge 10.1B).

I know little to nothing about progress - leaning towards nothing. Sadly my experience is more with SQL/MySQL and Oracle.

I'm supporting this client's network, servers and telephone systems.

They are distributed over several locations in the South West United States.

The progress database is running on a dual socket, dual core Intel server with 2.0G cores, 13GB of RAM and 3 mirrored sets of disk.

Yep - you heard right - they've got six physical disks (15k rpm drives) and chose to setup 3 mirrors. I'm not sure that makes ANY sense at all but i would have thought if you're going to mirror - do a raid 10 so you get the extra spindles shared.

Its running windows because they put the server up originally as thier domain controller as well so it's running some other infrastructure services like DHCP, DNS and Active Directory.

They use two separate terminal servers to present the apps to the employees. These two servers run Intergy EHR which connects to the database.

I'm seeing a HUGE number of processes taking on average of 500mb+ of memory and this adds up to WAY more than the 13GB in the server. However the server shows 6GB free of memory with 6GB used of pagefile space. I'm also showing two 13GB swap files on the C: and D: drives.

I'm not seeing too high of a disk queue on the server - but I'm thinking maybe its masked because it's coming in the form of heavy paging to the disk because of memory shortage.

I may be WAY WAY off base here, but not knowing Progress and how it works and what to look for, I'm really really struggling.

Can any one offer me any direction?

The performance issues I'm seeing seem to point to the Database and I'm thinking IO issues.

Thanks in advance - I'm standing by and prepared to answer all questions you may have about the environment to help paint a picture for you. Please include Progress specific instructions to collect information that you may request - I have no idea how to even get to an SQL type CLI to query information you may request.

Thanks thanks thanks!!

PS - See attachment for process list. Its from Process Monitor so it's got LOTS of good info. Turn off your word wrap or it will be UGLY.

Humbly yours.....


John

 

[tamhas]

The size of a process includes the shared memory so all the shared memory is counted over and over and over again.

 

[MaximMonin]

Real memory consumtion isnt big as you think. Server processes use shared memory that added to every thread in task manager.
It seems db cache is up to 1GB. It is why disk usage is low. Buy common performance problem is CPU use by those processes.

 

[taberj]

Great!

That makes sense now -

So it sounds like I'm far from a memory issue here - infact - I've got 6GB or so that I'm not even using/leveraging. Should I be?

So what would you recommend I look at next? 4 Cores at 2.0Ghz is sufficient? CPU averages 20 - 50% throughout the production hours.

More Cores are better for Progress?

If you were supporting 5 Terminal server users on a server, what size server would you recommend?

The slowness we see is generally when we switch between major components within the application. There can be some heavy delays. 10+ seconds.

Thanks EVERYONE for your attention and time!

John

 

[tamhas]

My first recommendation would be a consultation from a company like WhiteStar. They can review your setup and performance, make recommendations, and get you started on the right path in terms of monitoring, maintenance, and education. Poking around in the dark, it could take a long time to get anywhere useful.

 

[taberj]

That sounds good - I would like that - who would you recommend that I speak with?

 

[TomBascom]

Thanks Thomas!

I am with White Start Software and I hang about in this forum from time to time

The fastest way to handle things is to engage us as consultants on this project - Progress database performance analysis and tuning is a big part of what we do! Contact me at Tom@wss.com.

I am also perfectly willing to answer questions on the forum as time permits and within reason. But that tends to take a lot longer and there can be a lot of frustrating back and forth and so on as we dig into the details of what is going on and having you go get this, that and the other bit of information.

 

[cj_brandt]

As a former medical mgr, emdeon, sage employee... I know a little about Intergy and EHR. Are there specific items you are having performance issues with ?

 

[tamhas]

My recommendation just introduced himself!

 

[NayanB]

Hi Tom,

Actually, I am not DB guy but using Progress Openedge 10.2A is my backend server. I am facing performance issue on executing sql query on Progress database.
The first query request execution is taking about 4- 5 minutes even it return 2 records and subsequent query execution takes 2 secs. Please assist me what is the issue and resolution for the same.

Thanks in advance.

 

[RealHeavyDude]

Please don't revive old threads which address a different issue. The performance of an SQL query is a completely different thing than memory consumption of a 4GL client ...

There is a reason why a query is executed slower the first time ( or immediately after the start of the database ) than on subsequent executiond if there is not much time between the requests: It's the buffer pool - which is database blocks stored in memory. Chances are that on the subsequent requests the records are already in memory so that the database engine does not need to read them from disk.

The generic reason for generic query slowness is that the query can't be solved with an index so that the database engine has to scan the whole table on disk to find the records that satisfy the query.

Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.