Primavera P6 System Performance

currently, our team has more than 10 projects, each has more than 15000 to 18000 activities and it’s running so well. are you using oracle or ms sql? How many seconds does the analysis take?

Hi John

The biggest project I ever worked had 191000 activities - so 382 K activities inclusive BL. To load it was limited by the speed of the network and after some optimization took about 2 minutes. "F9", calculation of the schedule, was never an issue, so I never measured time. It must have been less than one minute because if more than I would have tried to improve.
With Oracle the number of projects and of activities shouldn’t be a problem. MS SQL seems limited, but outside of your quantities.

Reasons for low perfomance I found in the past was more related to parameter settings, e.g. "cost optimization" for the database, or was related to special projects. "Drive activity dates by default" can be nasty if not marked.

Check if bad performance is related to a special project, special functions, or users. If you want you can send me one of the projects with low performance and I’ll have a look.

Regards
Dieter

We dont seem to have problem with scheduling one project. But when you want to open Multiple Project (With resource etc it crashes)

So there is a limit.

I would say the Max number of Project that I can Open is about 10.

we are working across continents with more than a hundred (small) projects, I can open all at the same time in less than 20 seconds,...yes our projects are all resource loaded

"Plan Plan"

This kind of problem I never had.

Regards
Dieter

Performance problems at one organisation are not necessarily for the same reasons at another organisation. I’ve worked on optimising Primavera at different organisations and none required exactly the same changes.

I use an approach called Method R which always gets results.

Basically there are three places where performance may need optimising:

- Desktop PC - rarely an issue unless the PC being used is old or mis-configured in some way.

- The Network - frequently a problem and making changes to the network is expensive and can have a negative impact elsewhere in the organisation. There are ways around this such as using Citrix or putting users on the right tool. The Primavera Web products or the standalone application.

- The Servers (Database & Web server if you use one) - for now I’ll assume you aren’t using a web server. Most DBAs don’t know how to tell if an application is having a performance problem or not. It’s a bit like the office air conditioning system. On average the temperature and humidity is just right, but Alice in Stationery is freezing cold. She complains about the cold and the Office Manager just says "We checked the system and it’s fine".

The approach I take is to gather information about your system from yourself and the IT organisation. Basically a couple of phone calls. Then I arrange access with the IT folk - this is the biggest risk because they don’t always see it as someone coming in to help. I arrive on site and set up some benchmark tests of the user interactions i.e. Logging into Primavera, Opening a project, F9 etc. Basically whatever is slowing you down. Then I measure it and look at various logs that have been created. From this we can find out where most of the time is spent and we deal with the biggest first. We stop when performance is improved enough.

There is no clutching at sraws or guessing with this approach. Feel free to contact me to discuss this further.

Barrie

Thanks guys... this gives me a few leads.....I’ll no doubt get some "we’ve tried that" replies once I start talking to the others.

Barrie... luckily(I say this with my tongue firmly in cheek) we are part of the IT department ! so getting to the people who matter is a lot easier than in other places.

CITRIX is expected to be the route we go when we do roll this out fully so that may help but in the mean time we’ll do some investigating. The company has gone through a desktop refresh but it could be that our "developer" machines have a slightly better spec and therefore not suffering from the delay on "F9"

We will have a lot more than 10 projects so thanks for mentioning it. I’ll make sure it’s checked even if it’s not a common problem.

By way of comparison I’ve just analysed a fully resourced, 68,000 activity with 167,000 contraints network in Artemis9000 in 35 seconds... bliss !

Happy Planning for 2010

Hi John

I had no idea that people were still using Artemis.

It was the first planning software that I bought and jumped ship as soon as powerproject came along.

I am about to go live with a Powerproject enterprise programme on citrix - completely new territory for me - with 10 remote licenses for 40 users.

Currently the F9 runs in nano seconds - we’ll see what happens next week.

Best regards

Mike Testro

Yes a few of us here still use Artemis9000. It’s quite big in the US apparently.

The company moved onto Artemis Views several years ago but Artemis9000 survives in the background extracting data from Views and the ERP/Financial system and then running EVM which is then published into Oracle tables for the wider comunity to view the data. We used to use a Product called Artemis Cost View for this but it was prone to user error and was a headache to correct once this went wrong.

It does mass processing of data(that would take an army of planners to do) quickly. It also allows us to develop the procesess to suit our buiness, again this would be very time consuming done in your average planning environment.

I spent 13 years working at Artemis in the UK and many of my colleagues are from Artemis. Although we all used Artemis Views we align to either 7000 or 9000.

These new fangled tools may look pretty, but they’re not the real thing are they :-)