Don't know if any of this applies, but this is what I got from support on this issue.
Summary: How to improve printing performance in Epicor 9
Book: Support Solutions
Page: 1441BRK
Page 1441BRK
XA 9.04
XA 9.05
Issues:
How to improve printing performance in Epicor 9 My reports take too long to print Some users can print quickly but for others it takes several minutes
Possible Answers:
Here are some information to explain the printing process and how to tune the various parameters to your needs.
ARCHITECTURE
When printing Epicor 9 has two basic design goals:
1. Allow users to schedule print jobs
2. Use the Crystal runtime engine at the client level (to minimize
the cost due to Crystal licensing)
The consequence is that the printing is basically separated in 2 phases:
1. Server: The dataset creation, i.e. XML documents
2. Client: The print job rendering
SERVER Delay
When a client wants to print, a request is sent to the server. This request is picked up by the System Agent.
However to avoid consuming too much resource, the System Agent is set to check for jobs every x seconds.
This is set in the Processing Delay set in the System Agent maintenance screen. By default, this is set to 10.
So, at the most it could be as long as 10 seconds from the Client requesting the print, before the server picks that up.
If your server is fast then you could try to reduce this to 5 but I wouldn't go lower than 3.
CLIENT Delay
Once the client has submitted the request, it polls the server to see whether the job has completed.
The frequency of these checks are determined by the System Monitor.
Please note that these parameters are client specific so they could be different, for example if some clients have a lower network bandwidth
To check/change these parameters you can either:
1. Double click the System Monitor icon located on the client
system tray, then go to Actions > Configuration
2. Go to System Management > Utilities > System Monitor > Actions >
Configuration
3. From the client directory start the ConfigEditor.exe, select the
config file, go to the user tab
4. From the client directory open the config folder, edit the
config file, look for the parameters containing "SystemMonitor"
These parameters as follows (all values in Milliseconds):
o Normal: how often the client normally checks for a completed
job. Default 30,000
o Priority: how often the client checks while in "priority mode".
Default 3,000
o Duration: how long "priority mode" lasts. Default 15,000
So in the default case, for the 1st 15,000 milliseconds after submitting a job, the client checks every 3,000 milliseconds to see if the job is ready. After the initial priority period, it will then check every
30,000 milliseconds.
Given the job might not be started for the first 10 seconds and that the priority period expires after 15 seconds, if the job doesn't complete in
5 seconds it will be another 30 seconds before the client checks again.
The answer to this is to increase the Duration of the priority period.
Experience shows that increasing the Duration to 30,000 in conjunction with reducing the Processing Delay above can have a dramatic effect on improving the overall time for prints to complete.
To give you an idea we've recently had a customer tuning those parameters to (server=3,client=30k/3k/30k) and they managed to get printing delays down to around 6-8 sec
OTHER FACTORS that could affect printing performance
1) In System Management --> Utilities --> System Agent, go to the
Server File Directory. Use the physical drive letter and path (on the Epicor server) to the Epicordata folder.
2) Defrag the hard drive of the client that is having slow printing
problems. Some customers have implemented this, seeing improvements in their print speeds.
3) Reports using ODBC may be very slow depending on the way it is
designed. It is recommended to use custom Report Data Definitions instead.
4) Make sure you are using the latest Crystal Runtime available on
Epicweb
5) Some printer drivers can cause delays so you may want to test
printing on a different printer
6) Setting the client default printer to be local rather than
network has shown increased performances in some instances
7) If you are running an antivirus on the server then make sure you
exclude:
o the Epicor databases
o the Epicor executables (standard and custom)
o the Epicordata directory (temp/working files)
From:
vantage@yahoogroups.com [mailto:
vantage@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of cdaxltd
Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2011 10:06 PM
To:
vantage@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Vantage] Crystal reports very slow running times. V Epicor9.04.507A
Does anyone else have issues with (and a fix for) very slow printing times? Reports are very slow to preview. We close and preview again before eventually report appears. Now affecting productivity. Suggestions please!!
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