We have the following problem:

SQL Server
Hardware HP DL360 4G Ram
OS Windows 2003 Server Latest SP
Running SQL 2005 latest SP

Max Exchange Server
OS Windows 2003 Server Latest SP
Hardware HP DL380 4G Ram
Running MaxExchange Server Sp1, Sr1 for SP1

We discvered that when we imported about 150 companies with :-
3600 Contacts
17000 UDF's
8000 Notes

The SQL server runs at 100% for about 3 days!

The import takes an acceptable amount of time - about an hour. But when we process data packets after the import has finished it grinds to a halt at 100%.

We have 70 Remotes and each one takes nearly 1.5 hours to process.

The early part of the cycle per remote is fast, it is just the last part "moving transactional records" that is hitting the SQL server. There is no activity or very little by spdm.exe on the Max exchange server and I/O on this server only occurs when the packets are being created.

All the activity is on the SQL.exe prcess on the SQL server. As the system processes the number of transasctions build. to about 31,000 transactions in the 6 tables that Maximizer uses.

Nothing at all, not even I/O really occurs on the server. It's just the processor at 100%.
We looked at the sql blocks and locks and it's not waiting for anything to happen. It's like it just has a very large amount of work to do.

It has been taking about 3 days for the amount of data stated above and as I said about 1hr 30 per remote site.
There is no corruption and once the time has expired the transaction tables are zero again and the server is back to normal. During the 100% SQL busy state no one of our 30 or so office users can get any sort of connection to the database using the LAN DSN connection.

We checked network i/o and dns and ip resolution between the servers and have come to the point of the following possible scenarios.

1. SQL has just too much work to do
2. Our database has some sort of corruption
3. Max9.5 Does not work well with SQL2005

We have eliminated the following:-
1. Server overheating
2. Bios not up to date
3. OS not up to date
4. Server underpsec
5. SQL not optimised

We have set up an identical test system and loaded the database onto this system which gives the same results in taking days to process and create the packets.

Any advice gladly received.

Hi there,

Have you tried load balancing the SQL Server? You can tell it that it is not allowed to take more that x% of the available CPU time.

That might lock down the amount of resource it chews up on the server so you can continue to do other things.

Unfortunately you can't do anything about the transaction records as that is how Max Exchange works.

Hi

If SQL.EXE is one process sharing it's time between processing changes from an import and changes and queries from LAN users then allowing it to give more cpu time to other tasks does not help our users unfortunately.

It has been found in the last few days that when Max Exchange Server processes the same number of transactions (32,000)on Max V9 it is very much slower than on version 8. Also When Max Version 9.5 processes 32,000 transactions it is 100 TIMES! slower than version 8...
This occurs on 200 as well as 2005 SQL.

We are importing a number of people from another database and changing the following
Adding Contact
Adding a Note
Modifying MaxExchange Distribution
Modifying 2 Security groups.

We set this going on Thursday and it will finish monday night! 3rd September 2007 effectively taking our office out for two working days. We have 20 or more of these imports to go in which impacts heavily on the new users training (20 staff) and the existing office LAN users 30 Staff.

The strange thing is it takes 1.5 to 2hrs 20 per remote site, regardless as to whether the data is going to that site. We presume this is due to the securty being set in the import.

We feel this is a Maximizer issue that will affect a large number of users who are on, or going to, 9.5 who have remotes as we have. Ours will grow from 58 remotes to 130 or so in the next 6 months but it looks like we have to have 2 months of down time to achieve this!

Anyone know what changed from 8 to 9.5 to make the MaxExchange/SQL transaction processing so slow?

Many thanks for any input.

Finally found out that it is a software issue in 9.5. We have a fix from canada which reduces processing time down to less than an hour from 3-7 days. Thanks for any advice given - M