How to troubleshoot slow performance with QuickBooks 2006 and above in a networked environment.
I am trying to reduce the size of a file for a client with very slow performance in QB 2006. Their file is ~280MB. I tried your suggestion from the Yahoo Sleeter group discussion board of doing the cleanup, then creating a portable file and opening that file. The new file after the round trip to the QBM is just as large as the old one. Have you discovered any other ways to produce a smaller file and/or increase speed in use? The client is using the file on a network.
Any light you can shed on this problem would be greatly appreciated.
If the round trip to the QBM didn't shrink it, I think your only option is to Condense. And that has it's own problems as we've discussed before, so the results may not be too great. If the condense is not sufficient, you'll probably have to "Condense and Remove All". Of course that means all historical data will be gone, so it's not great, but it might be your only option.
But before you go after file size reduction, check the following:
A) Verify that the network is not somehow overloaded. Make sure you're using 100mb network cards everywhere on the network. The old 10mb network cards should all be long gone by now, but just make sure.
B) Increase RAM, free hard drive space, and processor speed on the server. 2-3ghz processor or more, 1GB of RAM, at least 10% of the total hard disk size should be free, and the hard drive should be at least 100GB. - never skimp on hardware!
C) Verify that the "host" of the file is in fact the server.
For the steps, see my article on the QB website
(http://accountant.intuit.com/colleagues/product_tips/tip_ds_mastertipinstallingqb.aspx).
Other articles are at:
http://www.cpatechnologyadvisor.com/publication/article.jsp?pubId=1&id=1136,
Or, if you're feeling techie, another way to verify who the host is, is to:
1) find the IP address of the server (the internal IP address that is... Probably starts with 192.168.x.x).
2) open the file's ".ND" file with a text editor. It's just a small text file that says the IP address of the host.
3) if the ip address in the .ND file is not the server, then you know you have a problem.
In that case, do this:
1) Open the file on the computer that is currently the host. The IP address told you which one that is...
2) Turn off multi user hosting on that machine. File>Utilities>Stop Multiuser hosting.
3) Close the data file on all clients.
4) Open the file on the server, and "start" multi-user hosting from there. File>Utilities>Host Multi-user Access.
Now the host will be set to your server, and you'll be getting the best performance possible. If that's still slow, go for one of the condense options.
To learn more about tuning performance of QuickBooks in a networked environment, see Tuning Performance of QuickBooks in a Network