Handling Large Volume P3 Files

Hi Mohannad,

In these sort of situations the rule is get the best you can with the monies you have available. I would recommmend as much memory as possible (1gig plus) and any CPU with dual processing power (which is the norm these days).

I have always found Dell to be good machines and reasonably priced as they only sell online and so cut out the middle-man overhead.

I run a specialised machine built specifically for the number crunching needed for P5.

Regards,

Kevin.

Dual processor does not make P3 to run any faster. In fact I found it to be slower in my brand new computer with Pentium dual processor, 1 GB RAM and 300GB hard disk - compared to my earlier laptop with 512 MB RAM. And I read it somewhere that P3 actually cannot take advantage of dual processor.

One solution to your problem is breaking down the programme into several subpojects. This way you can open just the subproject you want and make necessary changes. You will only need to open the whole (Master Project) when you need to reschedule the project to see the results of interdependencies between subprojects.

Bijaya

I often run schedules with 10,000 activities and I agree things can sometimes get a bit slow.

I am not a technical person but here are a few things I have picked up in the past few years working with P3.

If you are running on a network this will slow things down, especially when there is a lot of other traffic. I suggest you keep the project file on a local drive and backup to the network drive each day.

Do you have a standard network load of the software, if so then load the software locally and just leave the licenses on the network.

P3 is a 16 bit application and I also understand it will not address extra memory, but the extra memory is always good for XP.

Laptops have robust hard disks which are often slower than their desktop equivalents and as P3 writes to the hard disk each time you execute a command, a fast local hard disk is always useful with P3.

Paul E Harris
Eastwood Harris Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia
Planning and Scheduling Training Manual & Book Publishers & Consulting
www.eh.com.au

another hint to speed up is to make sure that you construct your filters right and keep your organize under 3 levels.

Also cleaning up your libraries (code libraries) will speed up performance.

You can also try the following to speed up P3 operations:-

Remove subtotals and extra columns from the layout if not necessary.
De select options like auto-reorganize and auto-schedule.

keep "show relationship’option as off.

Try increasing ’Virtual Memory’ to a huge amount! This should speed things up.

I also agree with many of the suggestions already made, like switching of dependencies and subtotals. Don’t think reducing data cloumns will make much difference; the data still has to be calculated.