Medisoft running extremely slow

[Pferriegel]

My company recently installed Medisoft vr.15 on our computers a little over a month ago. We have 5 computers running the program all of witch have windows 7 installed. 4 of the computers are connected to the network via Wi-fi using wireless N. The last PC is hardwired to the router and is used as the Database server. For the first month or so the system as a whole ran fine. But in the last 2 weeks, the program itself has been running increasingly slower to the point where it is almost unusible. It takes minutes to open or change anything within the softwhere and then occasionally will just slow to a stop. It then freezes with no error message, and requires a program restart to get it working. The PC's that is being used as the database server runs Medifost fine with no issue. I have tried looking at everything from firewalls to wiring straight to the router to see if the wireless is causing it to run slow with no luck. Any ideas would be greatly appreciate!

[Gavin Walker]

I think you are on the right track. Hardwire one of your workstations and then see if Medisoft speeds up again. If that fixes it, then the problem is in your wireless network somewhere. There many reasons why a wireless network doesn't work so well which is why we generally don't recommend it to run Medisoft. Be sure to turn off your wireless radio to confirm that Medisoft really isn't using the wireless network when you do your testing.

[Pferriegel]

I switched some things up to try and fix the situation. So both the server and one of the work stations are hard wired to the router. Though that has no baring on how Medisoft runs. Both hardwired and wireless computers run equally slow. I had a chance to talk with the company that sold us the software and they had me move the Medidata to the C:/ drive and also raised some of the connection numbers in the Advantage Server service. This seemed to fix the issue for a couple days. But today when i came into work the system is starting to lag again.

[Gavin Walker]

Is it just the Office Hours that is slow or is both Office Hours and Medisoft equally slow? Is Medisoft just slow on start up but then runs normally once you log in? What Medisoft service pack are you on? If it is not slow in the areas I mentioned, then in what area is it slow exactly? Can you quantify exactly what is slow? For example, it takes x seconds to do such and such operation. What is the clock speed and amount of RAM you have on the server and workstation? Is the speed of your hardwired network 100 mbit?

[Pferriegel]

Thanks for taking the time Gavin to try and help us out. And to answer your first question, yes, both Office Hours and Medisoft run equally slow. Both programs can take anywhere from 5 to 8min to start up. Once in the program it takes anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes for the program to make changes (Example: if you were click a date in office hours, it would take 30 seconds to a minute for it to open up that date. Then another minute to open a time to schedule the accentual appointment.) As far as the speed of all the computers, in the office all the computers with medisfot on them have 2gb of ram and a duel core 2.00GHz processor or faster. The server in particular has 4Gb of ram and and a Duel Core 2.9GHz processor. Both the server and one other PC are connected with a cat5 100mbit connection to the router. I hope that clarifies some things for you. The things is, I would be concerned on the network connection and the speed of the computers but i have had medisoft run flawlessly on the current set up. Whats strange is that for whats seems to be no reason at all, the software becomes frustratingly slow again. Any ideas would be extremely appreciated.

[Pferriegel]

Oh, 1 last thing. Medisoft version 15 sp2 (15.2.2.324) is what the computers are running.

[Jilda13]

This won't solve the problem but might give you a better handle on what's going on.

Open the Windows Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del -- the three-finger salute). Click on Processes. You will see all the services and applications running on the machine. You will see labels "Image Name, User Name, CPU, Mem Usage." Click on CPU. You will see which processes are active. Most likely you will see something at the top of the list that is using all your CPU resources. If things are just burbling along nicely you will see System Idle Process at the top of the list using 95% or more. That's fine. It's what else is using 95% or more for a long time that might be of concern.

Not specifically with Medisoft, but I have often found some service or application that seems to be stuck in a rut. Usually I can just close the process. Close the wrong one, though, and the system will crash.

[Gavin Walker]

Try this:

Go into Internet Explorer. Go to Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings

Uncheck the option Automatically Detect Settings.

Medisoft attempts to update itself over the Internet on start up. See if this setting helps.

[Jilda13]

In our case the culprit proved to be MsMpEng.exe, which is Windows Defender. We have uninstalled Windows Defender, but other scan on startup applications can also slow things to near stasis.

[Paul Williams]

Focusing on your server,

1. What are the specs of the machine you've designated as your database server?
Adequate Processor? Sufficient Memory?
Type of hard drive? free space? defragged?
A large-enough and contiguous page/swap file?
LAN connection speed?

2. What is running on your server (besides ADS)?
Antivirus? (Argh! We've blocked our server from internet access and have NO antivirus/malware software installed).
What other unnecessary startup applications or services are running?
What OS are you running? (Oops, I guess you mentioned it is Windows 7, if it's related to that, I'm of no use!)

We have zero startup programs and have killed more than a dozen default services on our Windows Server 2003 X64 installation (automatic update, remote registry, themes, telnet, webclient, firewall, etc etc etc). Our server and network hardware is fairly beefy and serves up Medisoft queries to 20 users almost instantaneously.

PS - Monitor your ADS configuration settings. I will show the "max used" for different categories. Having them either too low, or too high, results in a performance decrease. We're still tweaking ours from the update to v15 and it's new reporting software, but presently are getting by with 300/1500/300/150/30/10.

[Pferriegel]

Focusing on your server,

1. What are the specs of the machine you've designated as your database server?
Adequate Processor? Sufficient Memory?
Type of hard drive? free space? defragged?
A large-enough and contiguous page/swap file?
LAN connection speed?

2. What is running on your server (besides ADS)?
Antivirus? (Argh! We've blocked our server from internet access and have NO antivirus/malware software installed).
What other unnecessary startup applications or services are running?
What OS are you running? (Oops, I guess you mentioned it is Windows 7, if it's related to that, I'm of no use!)

We have zero startup programs and have killed more than a dozen default services on our Windows Server 2003 X64 installation (automatic update, remote registry, themes, telnet, webclient, firewall, etc etc etc). Our server and network hardware is fairly beefy and serves up Medisoft queries to 20 users almost instantaneously.

PS - Monitor your ADS configuration settings. I will show the "max used" for different categories. Having them either too low, or too high, results in a performance decrease. We're still tweaking ours from the update to v15 and it's new reporting software, but presently are getting by with 300/1500/300/150/30/10.

1.It has a AMD Athlon II X2 2.90GHz duel core processor with 4gb of DDR2 800MHz.
Two Mirrored 1TB Sata 7200rpm hard drives with 883GB free.
Haven't even messed with the virtual memory but I'll give it a shot.
Its connected to our router via cat5 100mb connection.

2. Only thing on the server is Bit Defender
I'll try and mess with some of the startup programs, though I really cant see why that would be having any effect seeing as the computer never restarts and when we come in on Monday medisoft is as slow as malassis.

We did have our ADS configuration numbers low originally but I'll see if i can tweak them further.

As a side note, we purchased Windows Server 2008 R2 Foundation 64bit thinking it would be compatible (my mistake assuming). Though now the people we purchased the software said some of their other costumers had issues with the 64bit enterprise edition and had to downgrade. I have been waiting quite some time for their response in to regards of it being compatible before I go gallivanting off and install it just to find us in a worse situation. Though dose anyone know weather its compatible or not and if you think i would even help with out situation.

Try this:

Go into Internet Explorer. Go to Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings

Uncheck the option Automatically Detect Settings.

Medisoft attempts to update itself over the Internet on start up. See if this setting helps.

I'll give that a try as well, Thanks for all the advice I appreciate all of you taking the time.

[Gavin Walker]

As a side note, we purchased Windows Server 2008 R2 Foundation 64bit thinking it would be compatible (my mistake assuming). Though now the people we purchased the software said some of their other costumers had issues with the 64bit enterprise edition and had to downgrade. I have been waiting quite some time for their response in to regards of it being compatible before I go gallivanting off and install it just to find us in a worse situation. Though dose anyone know weather its compatible or not and if you think i would even help with out situation.

We have found Medisoft v15 to be compatible. 64-bit O/S won't help the Medisoft much though for two reasons:

1. The main benefit of 64-bit O/S is more RAM. 4GB is the MAX you can have with 32-Bit Windows. So, you will also need to increase your RAM to at least 6GB to realize any more RAM benefit.

2. Medisoft v15 is still a 32-bit app and it requires the 32-bit version of Advantage Database. Both can only run in and address memory in the first 4 GB of RAM even though you might have more RAM.

So, unless you are actually running out of RAM, I would look elsewhere for the bottleneck.