I forgot to mention, we have 74 users working in Sage all day long.

My apologies,

- Jim

Are you hosting Sage internally and if so have you checked your network?  

I know there are guidelines in the SPM for how much ram to add for each add'l user on (of the server).  That could affect performance.

A little known secret is that Sage 100 Advanced aka MAS 200 is faster than the Premium of SQL version. With that many users you want to make sure you are doing daily maintenance on the server of killing "ghost" sessions. Those are sessions where people are not logged in Sage 100 but their pvxwin32.exe is still running on the server. Ghost sessionw will effect things.

While I don't have specific knowledge on this or access to Sage's benchmarks, I think this statement is likely only true in the case of systems with just a moderate rate of transactions. It's pretty hard to beat MSSQL for intensive database operations where constant transactions are hammering the system. SQL also has so many options to fine tune for a given application, excellent backup options, and management, unlike ProvideX.

It's also hard to beat SQL's ease of interfacing other applications to MAS, such as web access or use of MAS data within MS Access or other database applications. The ProvideX OBDC system is a total disaster compared to SQL.

Lastly, total system size scalability in SQL is vastly superior to ProvideX. While few will reach the limits, ProvideX file size is limited to 256 GB but in order to do so, the files must be segmented into 2GB sub-files with much extra system overhead, whereas SQL can handle national  Social Security Administration sized files of up to 16 Terabytes!

I'd welcome hearing from anyone who has better, more specific information about this aspect, but again, few of us will ever reach this level of transaction data rate.

In the case of this customer's issue, beyond the suggested memory upgrade, I'd also look seriously at the speed of both the processor (hopefully multiple) and the method of RAID used to optimize disk transfer. RAID 1 or 1+0 would be desirable to maximize read performance. We have nothing like that number of users but I don't consider our server with dual quad core Xeon processors running on a 3.4 MHz motherboard, with 6 Gbit/s drives in RAID 1+0 to be overkill at all. There are no hiccups in this system even when backups (to another server) are in process. I'm also assuming that most systems today are configured with standard Gigabit infrastructure, with quality NIC's and switches.