The Spotlight : Performance

Six tweaks to improve performance

Nicholai Burton — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:46:00 GMT

So you've loaded the latest SQL patches and Windows service packs, updated Patron Edge and PEO to the latest version and trimmed down transaction times, but your database just can't keep up with you. Before going out and buying a brand new, top-of-the-line server for your database, try some of these tweaks to get a bump in performance.

Update your compatibility level - If you updated at some point from SQL Server 2000 to version 2005, chances are your database is still running in SQL 2000 compatibility mode. Microsoft claims performance gains by updating to 2005 so make sure that your database is taking advantage of it.

Keep things tidy - Imagine you are making dinner and having a conversation at the same time, and end up putting a corkscrew in the wrong drawer. The next time you need the corkscrew it takes longer than usual to find it, right? So after a while you go and reorganize everything to find things quickly again. Just like you need to reorganize the kitchen cabinets every once in a while to find the things you need, you also need to reorganize your hard disk and your database to make data easier to find. See this article for defragmenting the physical filesystem, and Knowledgebase solution BB120081 for steps on rebuilding the database indexes.

Update statistics - SQL Server keeps statistics about all of your tables and idexes. This includes things like the number of rows in a table and helps SQL determine the best way to build a query and return data. Keeping statistics up-to-date allows queries to run their fastest. Check out Knowledgebase solution BB137060 for a how-to.

Split your database files - Reading and writing from the hard disk is one of the biggest performance bottlenecks of SQL Server. To reduce the time it takes to read and write from a disk, put the database file on one hard disk and the log file on a second disk (on the same machine). See solution BB113761 for steps to do this. If you have three hard disks, put the ‘Tempdb’ database on a third disk for the best performance. It’s not too difficult to do, but you’ll want to consult your system administrator first.

Check out your memory - Another great way to improve performance is to ensure that the server has enough memory. Right-click the taskbar and select Task Manager. On the Performance tab, check the Commit Charge total against the Physical Memory total. If the Commit Charge is regularly jumping higher than the Physical Memory, the machine is attempting to convert hard disk space into memory, which is slow. This is a good case to buy more memory for the server.

Give SQL an edge over other applications - By default, Windows is configured to give running programs priority over background services. We can switch this so that SQL Server and other services have priority over programs run in the foreground. To do this, go to Control Panel, System, Advanced. In the Performance section click Settings and click Advanced in the new window that comes up. Finally, set the Processor Scheduling section to Background Services and click OK.

Are there other tweaks you've found to get more out of your database server? Share your experience in the comments.

Five ways to cut transaction time

Nicholai Burton — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:54:00 GMT

On a busy day, every second counts when making a sale. Long lines make patrons impatient and a bad enough waiting experience can even be enough to prevent someone from coming back to visit you. Lines at theme parks are so bad nowadays, my wife and I don't even bother anymore. With that in mind, here are five tips that can help you cut mouse clicks and seconds from every transaction:

Remember price types when buying several events at once
Patron Edge has a Company setting called Ignore Price Type Reordering. Set this to No, and what will happen is that when you choose a price type and tickets for the first event in a transaction, it will remember that price type for all subsequent events in the sale (if it's available). This should save at least a couple of clicks per transaction if you have a lot of patrons who buy several events at once
Use the touch screen
If you are a general admission organization, use the touch screen for sales. You can remove at least 3 mouse clicks per transaction by using the GA sales screen instead of the standard screen.
Use shortcut keys
If you are a reserved seating or mixed organization, the GA screen doesn't do you any good. But the standard sales screen in Patron Edge has a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Check out our User Guides page for a cheat sheet you can post next to the cashiers' monitors, called the Sales Keyboard Shortcut Reference Sheet.
Trim payment method options
In the payment screen, there are a lot of payment methods available by default. It's likely that you will never find yourself using several of these. To declutter the screen, go to Administration, User Setup, Profiles and turn off unused pay methods. You can see Knowledgebase solution BB198026 for detailed steps if you are unfamiliar with editing profiles.
Create a cash-only line
For popular events and big on-sales, having a line dedicated to cash transactions can help keep lines short. If it's advertised well enough, it may even prompt patrons to come visit with cash in hand, sparing them long lines and saving you money on credit card fees. While you're at it, configure your cash drawers to pop before receipts print; the cashier will have the chance to make change while a receipt prints and can then hand both change and receipt to the patron at once, shaving precious seconds from a transaction.

I'm sure you've come up with other tips and techniques to minimize wait time. What has worked best for your organization? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Firefox 3 has been released!

Nicholai Burton — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:35:00 GMT

Firefox, the greatest of the modern browsers, released version 3 of their product just about four hours ago and it has already been downloaded nearly 3 million (million!) times. It's more secure, prettier, faster and smarter than anything else out there (yes, even you Safari). I encourage all of you to download and use it exclusively for a better browsing experience. If you need to access your Patron Edge Online Administration Site, you can install the excellent IETab extension and do it all in one browser. With this extension I don't think I've purposely launched Internet Explorer in two or three years, and haven't had run-ins with malware of any kind. And now it even integrates with web apps. For example, I can click a mailto link and it will launch my Gmail composer.

For those who have done a fair amount of PEO design work and had to do any special browser-specific tweaks to make things look the way you want, make sure to test your site in this newest version to ensure that your patrons won't experience any display issues. The US and Canada together have almost hit the one million download mark, so you can be sure that your patrons are using it already.

Is your website slowing down your online sales?

Nicholai Burton — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:07:00 GMT

Different research tells us that the average online shopper will wait between four and 10 seconds for a page to load before giving up. One decent article I’ve managed to find indicates that the number is much closer to four than 10. And US broadband penetration is currently in the 80% range (scheduled to hit 90% by mid-year), so keep in mind when designing your site that two out of every ten of your potential patrons are visiting you via dial-up.

So what can you do to make your Patron Edge Online site a little zippier? First, visit this page load tester to see how fast your site currently loads. It’s good to have a starting point so that you can gauge what techniques are most effective for you. I’ve included a few ideas to get you started, but a quick web search will pull up dozens more ways to make your site load faster without sacrificing quality. Come in before the box office opens one day, take a half hour and try a couple of the following:

Use CSS whenever possible. Putting your site design into the CSS file instead of using inline HTML style tags will improve load time, as the CSS is loaded once and then cached in the browser for the rest of your session. If you start with a main site for content management and then link into your PEO site, combine the two CSS files into one.
Optimize the images on your site. Excessive or oversized images are one of the biggest causes of a slow load time. JPEGs are the largest and slowest image files to load. GIFs are generally better, but if you can, I recommend putting your images in PNG format. PNG files tend to have the smallest footprint without sacrificing image quality. There are plenty of free image converters out there, many that don’t even require you to download any software.
For show images, don’t use the same file for the small image on PEO that you use for the medium image. Otherwise you are just hurting your load time when the default PEO page loads by downloading a bigger image that then gets scaled down in the browser.
If you are linking to a directory instead of a specific page, put a slash at the end of the link so the web server doesn’t have to try to figure that part out. http://mysite.org/tickets/ will load faster than http://mysite.org/tickets.

Other ideas to speed up your website? Please post them in the comments.

Giving PEO a 30% speed boost

Nicholai Burton — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:12:00 GMT

This tip isn’t for everyone, but for those of you who have an environment where your web server can talk directly to your PE database server, we can eliminate two applications called Queues and Listener and really speed up load times on your PEO site.

To do this requires PEO 3.2.5 or higher and some specific environments. If you have the web site on one box and your PEO/PE databases on a second one and they can communicate directly (using a technology called DCOM), you’re in business. Sorry, hosted PEO folks! Here are the steps to set it up

Stop the PEO Manager Service
Open your ToptixEsro2.ini file and remove Queues and Listener. Be sure to re-number the other applications because PEO Manager service needs them to be in order starting at 0
Edit the Sites table in your PEO database, giving it the following settings
- stSroIP - machine name of the PE server, or leave it blank if both databases are on one box
- stSroPort - 999
- stSyncIP - blank
- stSyncPort - 0
- st_eSRO_IP - blank
- st_eSRO_Port - 0

Now restart the PEO Manager Service and enjoy your new performance gain! Internal testing has shown improvements of up to 30% in performance on database requests, depending on the kind of request being made. You’ll notice that the seat map is particularly zippy. Say goodbye to L300 errors forever!

PE, PEO and SQL 2005 compatibility

Nicholai Burton — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 01:06:00 GMT

One of the features of PEO 3.2.5+ and PE 3.240+ is the ability to run on SQL 2005 natively. If you are relatively new to PE/PEO and are creating a new database in SQL 2005, it will automatically be in 2005 mode (also called compatibility level 90). But if you have upgraded an existing SQL server instance to 2005 while already using PE or PEO, you should note that SQL Server will not automatically convert databases to 2005 mode.

To update the database, just follow these simple steps:

Open SQL Management Studio and connect to your SQL Server instance
Locate your PE or PEO database, right-click and select Properties
On the Options tab, set the compatibility level to 90 and click OK

I’ve done a fair amount of research and it looks like 2005 has some speed increases over 2000 in certain situations; however it is disputed whether or not 2005 gives significantly better performance across the board. In any case it does allow you to take advantage of some of the new features of 2005, such as improved reporting services. Personally, I love being able to have Enterprise Manager, Query Analyzer and Profiler accessible all in the same application.

Is your organization updating from SQL 2000 to 2005 in the near future or have you done so recently? What is your advice to others who are thinking about investing in an upgrade? Leave a note in the comments.

Switch between HTTP and HTTPS automatically in PEO

Nicholai Burton — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 12:22:00 GMT

PEO 3.2.5 introduced a Protocol feature that is pretty handy and great for site performance. Everyone knows that HTTPS is the protocol to use for sending information securely, but it's also slower than regular HTTP. That’s why a lot of commercial sites don’t switch to HTTPS until a user is on a page where sensitive information is entered or personal details are displayed.

You can now do this in your PEO site through Site Design. Simply open any screen that you would like to secure and change the Protocol field from HTTP to HTTPS. Notice that there is a third option here called Any. It means that when this screen loads, it will follow the same protocol the previous screen was using.

I recommend securing the following screens at minimum:

user_data.asp
submit_basket.asp
any screen that starts with ‘crm’

Of course you can secure the entire site by way of certain IIS tricks or the link you use to send patrons to your PEO site, but why slow the site down when you don’t have to?

Are you currently using this feature? Do you feel it is helping your patrons’ user experience? Leave a note in the comments.