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Making I.T. Happen
Accounting and Information Technology, Assistance and Support
Sage 50 - Performance Improving Tweaks
Many people experience performance problems with Sage 50. Especially with large files.
You will not get great performance out of Sage on a Network.
There are quite a few things that can cause poor performance and there are several tweaks that can improve things.
- Networking Issues
- Hardware Issues
- Software Issues
- Slow Reports
- Large Data Files
- Sage ini Tweak
- AntiVirus
- Firewalls
- Updates
- BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE - Get the latest updates for your version of Sage 50. There have been a number of performance enhancing "fixes" all these are available free you DO NOT have to have SageCover you can download them for free from:-
www.sage.co.uk/accountsupdates
If you find a tweak we don't list, please let us know. using the feedback form on the left hand side of this page.
You might be able to get more help in our Sage 50 forum
SMB2 and SMB1 mixed environments cause really bad performance. You need to switch off SMB2 on all new PC's until such time as you have no XP or earlier PC's you can then enable SMB2 on all equipment. There is a great free tool to simplifiy SMB2 settings SMB2toggletoo
DNS you need DNS to be properly configured if you are in a domain environment and the Internet router is set to handle DNS request things are going to be very slow, it need to be the primary dns server.
Even with relatively small files Sage 50 can perform badly if there are networking issues.
There is no way we could possibly list all the issues that may effect network performance however, here are the general issues and some ways to resolve them.
Poor bandwidth. If your network is faulty and data can not transfer quickly then you will get performance problems on a 10 MegaBit network you should be able to copy data at more than 800KiloBytes per second eg an 8MB file should take less than 10 seconds to copy from one machine to another. 100Mb is the bare minimum speed for getting a reasonable performance. The cost of upgrading to gigabit networking is relatively small and Sage 50 is a heavy network user so it is worth doing (indeed gigabit is now the recommended infrastructure).
High Latency. Sage asks for data based on information in data it has just received. If you can transfer data at high speed you may still have high latency and this will slow performance. You can find out the latency by pinging between two machines whilst transferring a lot of data. High latency is cause by lack of bandwidth, the only move is to upgrade networking.
To talk to another machine you computer need to know the IP address of the other machine. If you do not have a DHCP server, we suggest that you use fixed IPs and set up hosts and lmhosts files in the windows system32 directory.
Multiple Protocols. If you have more than one protocol on your network then bandwidth is wasted. We recommend using only one protocol (eg. TCP/IP).
You can avoid all the problems of networking by running Sage 50 on a terminal server.
The more modern your operating system the more memory you need, installing an upgrade will improve performance and will not cost much. More RAM the better, if you want to DIY, be careful installing it and take precautions against ESD if in doubt call in someone who knows what they are doing.
When machines get short of memory they copy the contents of memory to hard disk, this is slowed down if you have a slow hard disk, hard disks can be slower if they share a controller with another device such as a CD an extra IDE cable will enable you to put the CD on a separate controller and improve performance for a few pounds. Disk fragmentation is where the files get broken up into lots of little pieces and stored all over the drive, the drive has to move back and forth across the surface of the disk to get all the data and this slows it down. You can reorganise the data on the disk with the disk defragmenter found by going start>programs>accessories>system tools>disk defragmenter.
Modern SATA drives do not suffer these issue as much. SSD's offer blistering windows performance but do nothing for network speed.
Download and install the latest drivers for your network card.
The only way to reduce the size of data files is to remove data from the system.
If you have stock codes, account code, old stock records and old invoices that are no longer required then removing them will reduce the size of the files and improve performance.
Delete Customer Accounts
Highlight the customer(s) you wish to delete in the customer module and press delete (the system will not delete accounts with any transactions)
Delete Supplier Accounts
Highlight the supplier(s) you wish to delete in the supplier module and press delete (the system will not delete accounts with any transactions)
Delete Nominal Accounts
Highlight the nominal code(s) you wish to delete in the nominal module and press delete (the system will not delete accounts with any transactions)
Delete Product Records
Highlight the product(s) you wish to delete in the product module and press delete (the system will not delete accounts with any transactions)
Remove Stock History
Go to Tools>Period End>Clear Stock. Enter the date you wish to delete records up to. Press OK.
Make sure you have followed year end procedures properly and that all un needed transactions have been removed.
Year end
The most common issues with year end not clearing fully are:-
- Clear Audit Trail not run
- Bank reconciliation's not done
- Un matched credits and invoices in supplier / customer modules
- VAT Returns not run
Providing you have done all these your audit trail should not have any retained transactions other than.
- Unpaid items
- Items that have not gone on a VAT return
- Items that have not be reconciled on the bank
- Opening Balances
We have a sage 50 year end guide if you are unsure.
Locate the Sage.ini file (in windows or winnt directory)
Open it in notepad
in the [SG50] section
add or change the line Files=XXX to Files=100
In your antivirus program set an exclusion for real time (Auto Protect) checking to exclude the sage data files, either by giving the path to your accdata directory or by excluding all Sage data files with *.dta
We have a Sage 50 Anti Virus configuration guide which give a lot of detail to help you do this.
You do not normally need a firewall inside a protected network. Exclude the local area network from your firewall, or better still us a hardware firewall on your internet connection and switch off all internal / windows firewalls and don't use dial up.
Make sure you have the latest patches installed for your version from the sage website.
www.sage.co.uk/accountsupdates
PC Performance Tweaking
Our guide on PC performance tweaking is here