A number of our users have noted issues with speed. Currently monitoring and logging at one location.

Stuart Hopkinson
Airedale NHS Trust

We have problems with speed in Pathology. On some PCs it can take 2 to 3 minutes for the inital search page to display.
But on our wards the speed appears to be acceptable.

Pathology is connected as a VLAN, so this may be a reason for it.

Our IT department and Sunquest support have not found any problems.

Hi Louise, Yes we have had major problems with ICE speed. Sunquest told us to upgrade the version of SQL we were running and this at first seemed to help a lot, but at the moment we are still having problems and Sunquest and our IT dept are still looking for solutions to this.
Cheers Kev

We are finding that at certain times of day it is unacceptable, certainly for our GP's.
We have been putting it down to N3 usage which we can't do anything about.
Additionally about every three minutes our system hangs for up to 30 seconds, I have yet to get to the bottom of this but think it is to do with the version of SQL

We have been working with SQ and other external consultants to look at performance issues and I am interested to hear other people’s experiences.

Recently we have identified issues on the supporting sql server database which meant it was forced in to memory paging which wrecked performance and the addition of more memory has helped to alleviate this. SQ also identified performance issues around Reports Analyzer. Is anyone else using Reports Analyzer and seeing issues?

We have yet to roll our service out but have already identified some undesireable timimg issues. There appear to be various services which require a component download. If you have not used a particular service for some time, (say a half hour) then the first time you try to access that service there is a delay, typically 40 seconds. This is most noticeable on the 'complete order' process. We use a physical server for our live system and a virtual one for our test service. The behaviour seems common to both and despite efforts on the part of Sunquest and our tech team the problem persists.
We have just switched on the link to AD for signons and this introduces a noticable additional delay in starting a new session.

We have had speed issue in the past and had on some occasion extremely slow weeks. We have been pulling our hair out before now.
Some time if nothing else is working and you are finding report being processed on lab comm slow to best to bounce all the servers. If it works it is good practice to put a routine in place to have them restarted every xx amount of months.
By the way we have had the system since 2002 got most ice products implemented as we were one of the first sites. We also have archive on our servers so we only keep 13 months of live data and the rest is archive off. It takes less that a minute to retrieve the data back by the users. We are not in the process of replacing the backend server db.

Jamie
Norfolk & Norwich

We have performance issues at UH Bristol around report filters and screen refresh.we run a SQL trace on the system and find that report analyzer and report list (reports by location) take over 10 seconds to display Been working with SQ (re-indexing,more memory,etc). We are currently looking to upgrade to Alpine.1 as SQ have told us this will improve performance. (currently in test). Has anyone moved to Alphine.1 and seen improvements in performance

Also looking at moving to 64 edition of server operating system and SQL database. Would be interested if other trusts run 64 edition or have moved from 32 to 64 edition.

Kdownes - you mention you have upgraded your SQL, what version are you running now?

I have noticed a decrease in performance since our last upgrade, Dec 2009. Is anyone running Alpine1 yet? have you seen any improvement?

The GP access seems OK, except for one area (6 practices) that suffers from slow iternet speeds. I have had ward reporting on the go for 12 months and the average screen refresh time is in the region of 15 seconds. I'm trying to put requesting onto the wards, but fear for the impact it would have on our current set-up.

Am I worrying unneccessarily?

Geoffem
geoff.elliottmcguffie@ahnst.nhs.uk
01535 293466

We are having huge performance problems here at UHL. We have a massively powerful SQL server box (HP DL580, 64 bit OS, 64GB RAM, 4 6 core processors), so I'd be confident that the performance issues are not releted to the resources avaialble to the database. Obviously I can't discount poor code in the DB but monitoring of the instance doesn't suggest there is inefficient code.

We have 3 web servers now, all virtual. We have split the GP users away from the internal users. Those GP users are split across 2 servers. We used to have 1 web server but noticed that the CPU was hitting 100% alot so introduced 2 more web servers, these are not struggling for CPU. The GP users are still telling us the performance is dreadful.

We are running Alpine 1.0 version 410 with hotfixes 1-15 all applied. Between SQ and ourselves we have yet to find the cause of the problem, but I suspect it is related to the application code.

Hello Simon,
We're also having ongoing performance problems and one of my colleagues in IT would be interested to talk to you. Could you let me have your email address?
Thanks.
Helen.kirk@sth.nhs.uk