Prinect Printready Cockpit - Slow as grandpa joe! (Mac)

[Helmet_of_Poe]

Originally Posted by RedOak

Here is a question for you all... Does it take 30 to 45 minutes to open printready on a Mac (intel or powerpc - single or dual processor) It takes 15 minutes on the PTData Server.

Opening Printready is a hour of our day times 10. Why so long for a server based app?

We're absolutely thrilled with the responsiveness of Printready! Are you talking about the time required to launch Cockpit? Sounds like some sort of configuration problem, or perhaps you have thousands of jobs on your Printready server. For the best perfomance, archive old jobs regularly and remove them from the system. We have almost 1,500 jobs on our system, but this is the max for us.

Our launch times for both Macs and PCs are anywhere from 13 seconds to 115 seconds. In fact, here's a somewhat scientific test of launch times on all 4 of our workstations (plus the Printready server):

1) 62 seconds on Mac (Dual Proc PowerPC G5 @ 2.5GHz, 1.5GB RAM, OS X 10.4.10)
2) 70 seconds on Mac (Single Proc iMac PowerPC G5 @ 2.1GHz, 1.5GB RAM, OS X 10.4.10)
3) 22 seconds on PC (Dual Core Athlon 64 @ 2.21GHz, 1GB RAM, WinXP)
4) 115 seconds on PC (Single Proc Athlon XP @ 1.8GHz, 2GB RAM, Win2000)
5) 13 seconds on PC (Printready Server - Quad Core Intel Xeon @ 2GHz, 4GB RAM, Windows 2003 Server)

These times were clocked with a wall clock and timed from clicking "Ok" at the login dialogue that pops up within 5-10 seconds of launching Cockpit on each machine. All Cockpit versions are 3.0 BLD464. Gigabit ethernet.

Since you state that launching Cockpit on your Printready server takes 15 minutes, it's unlikely that your network is your bottleneck. That would lead me to ask other questions. How many jobs are on your Printready server? How big is the RAID that the jobs are on? How much free space is available on the RAID? Do you archive your jobs regularly, and do you defrag your RAID after archiving and removing jobs from Printready?

I'm interested in hear back when you get a chance.

[RedOak]

We archive daily... but we just have to many jobs in our system.

We should have the same setup as you - we are neighbors and the whole setup was done by the same folks. (The Beach Folder you just did looks Great :wink: )


And to answer the raid question. It is 544 GB with 66 GB used.

I would like to come over and see your shop at some point in time. You all do great work and it seems from a customer stand point that you have a good working environment.

[Helmet_of_Poe]

Aahh, yes. I'm glad you liked the Dania folder. Thanks for the kind words about our shop!! We're proud of the work we turn out, and I'm glad that comes across.

You're welcome to come by anytime! We'd enjoy showing you around - maybe you can stop in the next time y'all have a press check.

In the meantime, I'm going to think through these issues you're having and see if there's any way we can help.

Take care.

[MarkTonk]

Helmet of Poe,

Thanks for your response!

RedOak,

By no means am I a operator but something is not quite right. Have you spoken to TAC on this? Or open a service call? Or please feel free to e-mail me. Thanks

Regards to both of you,

Mark

PS being a neighbor of Helmets, you are also a neighbor of mine. Are you a little north of here?

[RedOak]

Yep to ALL your questions but the other things put this on the back burner. We are the neighbors to the north. I sent you a PM.

[TheBlueShadow]

One of the main things that I have found with Printready is the stability and speed of the network really influences the response of Cockpit on the Mac.

You need a high quality router/switch along with at least Cat5e rated cable.

The network can't be slapped together with daisy-chained hubs and wire that runs along electrical cables, flourecent lights or under the carpet! I would highly recommend renting/buying a network analyzer and run it on each of your network drops. This could be the fastest easiest way to confirm your connections.

Even if the above is met, there are still a bunch of network type of configurations that need to be tuned. Separating the email and ftp traffic from the production traffic. If a domain, then correct permissions set for domain and computer authentication.

True, networks weren't that big of a deal before. Not any more baby! With pretty much anyone's workflow nowadays you need to have a tuned network to get the most out of it.

Hope this helps!

[RedOak]

Heidelberg came out and corrected the issue. We "WERE" using the email feature and tagging jobs finished and ready for production and so on.

The email approval system backed up our system on day one then got slower and slower from there. About 4 months into it, we stopped using the email and approval system but Printready retained all the unapproved jobs (Even after backups).

Short end of the story is we deleted all those "Unapproved" files and now we are running like a champ.

Thanks to everyone that tried to help on this.