Home → Star Bill of Lading → FAQ's → My Network Edition seems to be running very slow. What can be done about this?
8.5. My Network Edition seems to be running very slow. What can be done about this?
It could be that there is a large amount of data being passed as in old bill information in the database. You may want to try to purge some of the older data. This is an option in the program under the Main menu, File, Backup/Restore Data, Purge/Restore Old BOL's from/to System. Here you can remove older bills and can either permanently or temporarily purge the data based on a date selection.
Here are the instructions to purge your old data.
About the only other option that would speed up the whole process since you have many bills in the system is to upgrade the database software to the Client Server Version. This software is from SAP, called SAP Advantage Database. It installs on your server and is made for this type of processing.
The reasons you may need this software product is because our base package of the Star Bill of Lading software comes with a multi-user copy of their Local Database Server, which is installed on the workstation that the BOL software is installed on. This handles all the data processing of the BOL software but on a Local Level, which is fine for Single User Installations and some Multi-User Installations if the data processing is at a minimum because each data transaction is processed at the local level (on the workstation) and if the database location is local, everything runs smoothly and quickly. But if you are running the BOL and accessing the data on a File Server, each transaction that is called is accessed and processed on the local level, and the time to access each data record of each data file, takes time to pass this information back and forth between the workstation and server. So it is much slower to run if you have a lot of data to lookup and process, or if you have multiple users accessing the data at one time. So this software moves the processing to the Server level or data location level, which is exponentially faster.
Here is a short list showing the cost of the SAP ADS C/S software:
1 user server $159
2 user server $269
3 user server $450
5 user server $650
10 user server $1240
The above costs are based on concurrent users, which means users that are logged into the database or software at one time. Not installed, actually using the software at the same time.
The main difference while running this software on your network is the database processing is handled on the server where the data resides and not on the local workstation that the software currently runs on. This speeds things up dramatically as you do not have to pass all the data files back and forth from the storage location to the workstation and back and forth etc. There is a 30 day trial version available that you can download and install on your server so you can see the difference it makes if interested. You can obtain this trial from here. Here is the direct link: http://www.starresoft.com/boladsdownload.htm
Download and install it on your server (or shared workstation) that the Bill of Lading database files reside on. It is very simple to install and run. Hopefully this will solve your problem. If you do this, and are satisfied of the results, you can just contact us directly to purchase.
The only requirements needed to run the ADS C/S software is as follows:
1. The ADS C/S software needs to be installed and running on the server or shared workstation, as it runs as a service on the machine.
2. The Star Bill of Lading Database File Folder must reside on the same physical drive as the ADS C/S is installed and running on. So, if the ADS C/S software is on the C: drive, the Star Bill of Lading data folder has to also be on the C: drive of that machine.
There also maybe something bottlenecking your network, but that would be a long shot.