Hi everyone,

We're using FE 7.2 on a fairly fast win2k system, and it's taking forever to run some reports. We have 850 projects, and a project detail report for one month with almost no data (just budget) takes 20 minutes to run. I've opened a case with BB and their programmers are working on it, but it's been 2 weeks now and people are starting to get desperate. The performance check didn't show anything odd, so I'm curious if anyone has hit the same problem or if anyone has anywhere near this many projects? Thanks in advance,

Rob

Rob, I am experiencing the same slowness on reports. My server is also using MS 2000 server edition. My workstation is MS XP with the service pack 2 loaded. I have one report that takes a budget (filtered out for a particular department) and then breaks it down into activity projects. The report used to run fine on my computer (pre-MS SP2 being loaded). Now, the report runs for over 24 hours (!) and then I get a Microsoft error message. This is about a ten page report so it really shouldn't take this long. I've also tried running the report from the server station directly. It will produce there but takes about 24 hours again. Blackbaud support hasn't been able to provide an explanation for this to me but did mention that there have been reports of problems with the system where MS SP2 was loaded. Prior to upgrading to the 7.2 version, this report ran in a matter of 10 minutes or so. I am going to upgrade to 7.3 at the end of the week and I am hoping that this will improve the situation! I'd be thrilled to hear if you make any progress on your side as to problem identification.

We have about 200 projects. Everything is running much more slowly since our conversion to FE. We just upgraded our server and saw minimal difference. In particular, our AP checks take 20 times as long to process and print than they did in the past. Let us know if you figure out the problem. THX

Related slowness: We do a GL report that we ask it to "Sort" by Project with a page break between projects. Takes about 3 hours to run. We have 50 active projects. Top notch win2000 server with dual P4 processors and 1.5 gigs of RAM. Client end is also very fast. This is not a hardware issue.

Peter, Thank you for posting this info on the hardware. It is very helpful. I am trying to run an income statement report, filtered by department code (last two digits on our account structure) and expenditures only (account codes of 5xxxx). We are on MS Server 2000 as well but our RAM was low at about 512KB. We've upgraded to 7.3 yesterday to see if that helps and I have 2GB of RAM to be delivered today that we'll install. We are doing this because we found that the RAM was getting hit very hard. I'm discouraged to hear that you are having the trouble as well even though your RAM seems more than adequate. We are going to eliminate the RAM as a potential problem and then see if going to 7.3 helps anything. We are doubtful but feel that we must do this first in order to narrow it down to a software problem. We have thousands of projects but this report ran fine for me back in March/April 2004 when I was on the 7.1 (pre SQL server) version.

We are experiencing the same issue with project detail reports being slow with FE 7.4. We have narrowed it down to an account security issue. The reports run fine with the user having access to all accounts but if their account access is limited to a certain range, the report never runs. This is very frustrating due to most of our users do not need access to all accounts.