Project Server 2003 performance with large project schedules

[Dries]

This message was also posted on "microsoft.public.project.pro_and_server".
Mike Glen suggested that I should post it here as well, because the other
newsgroup is closing down.

One of our clients has a single server installation - A Quad CPU monster
with 4 GByte RAM.

They have very few active users - A maximum of 6-10 concurrent Project Pro
users. However, they have large and complex schedules - At the moment arount
5000 tasks per schedule, with a large number of custom fields, as well as
more than 30 resources assigned per schedule. It is envisaged that some
schedules may grow to 10 000 tasks per schedule.

We are getting puzzling performance problems : It takes as long as 15-20
minutes for a schedule to save. What makes this puzzling, is that when we
take this same database to a modest desktop in our lab, the same schedules
save in 3 minutes or less. This raises some questions, which I hope someone
in the community can perhaps help me with:

1) Has anyone had practical experience with very large project schedules in
Project Pro, saving to Project Server? (5 000 - 10 000 tasks) If so, how
long can we reasonably expect it to save?
2) Any ideas on what could cause the extreme performance problems we are
experencing on the specific server?

Thanking you in advance!

Dries

 

[Reid McTaggart]

Assuming you are not sharing your server with other applications, you should
be looking at your network latency and at your NIC speeds.

That said, if you have a lot of custom Enterprise Task fields, that will
significantly increase save times.