Poor NetTest results?

pdj · 2005-07-25

I’m currently troubleshooting the performance of a Navision installation, and have among other things used NetTest. (Well, actually I have used the virtual table Performance – it seems to be almost the same). The problems are when performing large “jobs” like posting, and not in normal navigation in the application. We have done a lot of optimizations in C/AL and know that we most likely will be able to do even more. However, I would also like to investigate the hardware configuration. But I lack some information about expected values, and some indication about how much influence it has on the overall performance.

I have measured about 10 installations and most results vary between 4000/900 to 5500/1200 (packets per second for 100 byte packets/4000 byte packets). However, the installation in question only reports 1500/400. It is a Citrix installation, so NetTest measures the speed between the Citrix server and the Navision server. This is a 100mbit connection, which I then suggested upgraded to a 1gb connection. However, it turns out to include quite an expensive upgrade since both the servers and network is outsourced to a third company.

So now I would like to hear you experience with NetTest values. Is 1500/400 so low it should be considered a problem? Which values would you consider critical? Does anyone have any performance measurements before and after the connection was improved? Do you have anything that can help me convince the decision makers to upgrade the hardware? (or to convince me that it doesn’t help much?)

Thanks in advance.

(Edit: I can see that Waldo mentions elsewhere in the forum that the value for 4000 byte packets should be at least 400, but since this is a Citrix server I guess it should be even higher?)

pdj · 2005-08-02

Doesn't anyone have any experience with the results in the Performance table? :-(

Now I have found another customer with two sites. At the main site it messures about 1200/550. At the remote sub-site it only reports 200/25 which are giving them a lot of problems, so the connection is going to be updated. But is 1200/550 really an acceptable speed? Then it doens't make sense to update the site which reports 1500/400...

Please share your results :-)

Thanks in advance

pdj · 2005-08-02

(Deleted due to double entry)

kine · 2005-08-02

My devel environment results:

Server, 2 users, 100mbps line - results - 6000/1000
Server, 7 users, 100mbps line - results - 3500/900

it is not same server - first is our devel server, second is our company server...

kriki · 2005-08-09

On my portable, I installed all my Navision-versions with a service and start the service I need and then open the client. I have 2200/890.

The first time I checked it out was with Navision 2.01 at the site of a customer with performance problems. I had only 400/70. It turned out that it was NOT the network that had problems (I had checked it out by a network specialist, and he said that the full band-width was not even used). And when I fixed all the programs and indexes, it worked fast enough.

So I think that 1200/550 is acceptable.

-Check out if the PC (local or terminal server) on which your Navision(s) run, is fast enough and has enough memory to keep all programs in memory. 1 slow client blocks even the fastest DB-server.
-COMMIT-cache
-big enough DB-cache
-not too many indexes in the tables
-RAID 1+0, and not RAID5
-Using correct indexes in the programs (See table Session, field "Sum Intervals". If this field has big values (>50000), you should check if the correct indexes are used)

pdj · 2005-08-11

Thanks for you replies. :-)

I agree that most performance issues are to be solved by other parameters than network speed, which we also made us change a lot of both ours and standard code. We are also automating several functions and chaning the workflow to make it more smooth.

However; I made a few tests on a server. By only changing the netspeed from 100mb to 1gb it changed the NetTest result from 4050/1000 to 4000/2000. This reduced the execution time of the same job with 25-30%. This is after the server and client are "warmed up" - the first test after restarting the client was always around 40% better on 1gb than on 100mb due to all the objects.

The question is just how this relates to a live configuration - I guess only time will tell... But if it is anywhere near 30% it would be great 8)

kriki · 2005-08-11

You can also monitoring the % of network bandwidth used. If you have a lot of peaks in it, and they take some time before they go away, it means that the bottleneck is the network.

Waldo · 2005-08-12

Recently we had performance problems at one of our customers. Nettest: 100 packets per second. Many clients were having Error x in module y.

Error was due to a broken switch. Switch was replaced, errors were gone, nettest: 700 packets per second.

I read somewhere in the manuals of Navision that the Nettest should be at least 400 packets per seconds for Navision to work properly. Higher ratings are better of course, but I don't think it will speed up the overall performance, because in that case, the network is not a bottleneck anymore.

I could be mistaken ... .

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