We are running a commercially available school administration system written in AREV 2.03 call Windsor (by Harts Systems, Vancouver, Canada).

I have long been frustrated with terrible performance under Windows NT workstation, and have tried all of the various tweaks found here.

Here is our setup:

NT 4 SP5 Server

Dual P2/233, 96Mb RAM, 10k RPM SCSI drives

Switched 100Mb LAN connection

NT LH service not used

Workstation 1:

NT 4 SP5

P/133 64Mb RAM

100Mb switched

Workstation 2:

NT 4 SP5

Dual P3/450, 128Mb

100Mb switched

NPP (All Networks Driver 1.5) installed on all workstations.

We have found the following:

1. AREV is painfully slow to use except in full screen mode

2. Fiddling with Idle Sensitivty helps when running AREV in background, but not by much. Many other DOS apps run just fine, including AccPac Plus, and even one written in REVG.

3. Running a student report which takes 2m 30s on Workstation 1, still takes ~2m on Wkstn 2, even though processing speed is at least 4x greater. During this process, server utilization averages less than 10%, and network/disk traffic is not overly high (~200Kb/s to client).

My questions are:

1. Are AREV 3.12 and/or the NT LH Service our only options for improved speed?

2. If so, what factor of improvement can we expect from the "Yield to Windows" function in AREV 3.12? Does this improve AREV speed, or simply improve responsiveness for other apps?

3. Will AREV 2.03 apps run on 3.12 unmodified? (from the reading I've done, it seems unlikely)

4. Assuming NO to #3, what factor speed increase can we expect from running the NT LH service with our existing 2.03 app?

5. Adding the "All Networks" driver only cut about 5-10 seconds from a 2 minute job (over using DOS 3.1+ driver). Does this sound correct? I was hoping for more…

And finally, the developer has written several front end GUIs in Visual Basic which apparently dress up the functions of the app, but do nothing to address these performance issues. Should we be concerned that this developer has not migrated the app to AREV 3.12, or found some other way to address NT performance issues?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Shawn Wright

Systems Manager

Shawnigan Lake School

Firstly check out this thread

With regards to your questions

1. Are AREV 3.12 and/or the NT LH Service our only options for improved speed?

Points above aside, pretty much.

2. If so, what factor of improvement can we expect from the "Yield to Windows" function in AREV 3.12? Does this improve AREV speed, or simply improve responsiveness for other apps?

Primarily other apps. AREV sits in a loop hogging processor time when idle thus causing 100% processor utilisation. This flag enables other apps to get a slice of the cake.

3. Will AREV 2.03 apps run on 3.12 unmodified? (from the reading I've done, it seems unlikely)The Sprezzatura Group[/url] World Leaders in all things RevSoft </QUOTE> —- === At 11 FEB 2000 04:19PM Warren wrote: === <QUOTE>Idle sensitivity should be set to max (or whatever the slider is all the way to the right). This will cut the CPU utilization significantly. While this won't speed up ARev it will speed up what ever other tasks are running on the WS. Running windowed: try changing your screen resolution, different video card/drivers, font sizes. I run ARev 2.03 on NT 4.0 server windowed with very little speed degradation with a Matrox Millenium card. Note slow down in windowed mode is mostly in screen updates, not actual processing time, however it can slow down processing depending on how much screen updates there are. Minimize screen updates in the application. </QUOTE> View this thread on the forum...