ServiceDesk

Hi,

Does anyone else experience very slow speeds when 'reclassifying' an incident?

Generally all web pages open quite quickly, but if you reclassify a call or Submit and incident using the 'Advanced Submit' option, it takes a good 35 seconds to load the page. After the initial page has loaded successfully, i can close and go back into the page very quickly. Obviously this sounds like it has more to do with caching. I've increased the settings under Application properties, that still means the initial opening of the page is going to take a very long time.

Just curious to see if anyone else has the same issues?

Regards

Hi,

I don't have an answer for that but since you are on the subject of speed and Service Desk 7, I am trying to get some feedback on the overall speed.  All of the demo's of the program that I have seen have been an order of magnitude slower than 6.5 (and that's slow to begin with).  What type of hardware do you run it on (DB and NS)?  I've seen it take 30 seconds to 1 minute to just enter a ticket upon clicking save and obviously it should only take a few seconds.  Thanks in advance!

-Adam 

HI Adam,

We have a virtual environment but the setup is as follows;

Notification Server (Symantec management Platform) (32bit) WIN2003
X2 Dual Core Processor
4 GIG RAM
200GiG HD


Service Desk 7 Server (64bit) - WIN 2003
X2 Dual Core Processor
8 GIG RAM
200GiG HD
(This hosts our SQL Server as well as Workflow - SQL 2005)

Thanks for the reply!  We host ours in an VMWare ESX environment and they are somewhat thin-provisioned.  Our NS (also the Helpdesk server) only has 1.5gigs to it and then dual proc.  Our DB server is a physical box, as putting it on the NetApps SAN environment we have is not recommended due to limitations in disk IO (at least until we can get FiberChannel).  If you had a rough estimate on the time it took to save a new ticket or switch between screens from both a non-cached start and then a cached start what would you say it was?  Also, have you guys done any special performance optimization for your ServiceDesk 7 environment?

In terms of your specific issue, I'm not positive on the inner workings but is that reclassify event eventually calling a stored procedure?  Might it be worth it to take a look at that to see if the bottleneck is there and also since it's built on Workflow, could you look at that specific process in the Workflow editor to see if you can enable some debugging or if you can see where it might be getting bogged down at?

-Adam

Symantec recommends 8GB of RAM for your SQL server and 8GB of RAM for your SD7 server, 16GB preferred.  Running them together, PLUS Workflow, might just be the reason for slowness.  Additionally, virtualization isn't strictly supported for SD7.

Have you run performance monitors on your SD7 server?  This article is technically written for SMP, but covers SQL databases and Altiris monitor sets as well:
https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=47816&p=1

I would recommend you read all items under 'Performance Tuning,' especially the last two on performance monitor counter sets and thresholds:

Creating a SQL maintenance plan to optimize database performance	KB40488
Optimizing SQL Server 2005 on Windows Server 2003	KB49632
How to create a Performance Monitor counter set for Altiris support	KB32258
Common Performance Monitor counter thresholds	KB45425

The upcoming maintenance release includes several changes that should dramatically improve performance in specific areas. These include

- The user and group management sections of the portal
- The advanced incident screen
- The incident reclassification screen

The first one has to do with performance improvements in the AD synchronization and better indexing, paging, etc when there are many groups and users (thousands). The second two are due to querying the NS for locations, business services, and categories. This should be dramatically faster now.

I will say that, no matter how much cpu and memory you allocate to a VM it will ALWAYS be slower than running directly on hardware because of the overhead of maintaining the virtual environment. VMs are super convenient but there is a price to pay.

Hi,

Any idea when the maintenance release is due?

Cheers
John

The above post from Stu refers to MR1 which has since been released. Aparently we are now waiting for MR2 which i hear should/hope to be out quite soon....

This is a little cheat for caching the forms. It certainly improves perception during testing phases.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/servicedesk-performance-cheat-cache-forms-and-processes-periodically