Extremely Slow Loading Forms (1 Viewer)

[Sonny Jim]

I have a form that loads impossibly slow. The display repaints as you go from field to field and there is even delays typing in characters into a field. In fact all of the forms have been loading slow, big and small. This has been getting progressively worse. Everyone connects via Windows Remote Desktop connection but it mostly effects the remote desktop connections that are off-site. It is a split database whose back-end is 26 Mbytes and 9 front end interfaces (each front-end interface is named differently) are 2.3 Mbytes each. They are compressed and repaired daily to weekly. I reduced the size of the slowest form by reducing the font size from 14 to 9 but no sooner than that began to show improvements that it went the other way and got much worse. I have been adding a lot of reports, 44 in all, and I have added 3 - 4 fields to the slowest loading form. This form has 6 combo boxes, 2 memo fields, two fields that rely on calculations made by the source query, and conditional formatting in 6 -7 fields. There are a total of about 34 fields and 9 buttons. The network guy insists it is the database, naturally not the server. First off, what is the best way to measure the server's performance? And more importantly, with this being as extreme as it is, getting worse daily, does this sound familiar with anyone?

 

[DCrake]

If you create a test front end by importing all the object in to a blank mdb and copy the back end to your local machine and link the tables accordingly. Do you get any increase in performance?

If so, now connect your new front end to the server and repeat. What is the result?

 

[Rich]

Are the data sources for the combo boxes loading with the form?

 

[DCrake]

Here is an aticle from the FAQ section

http://www.access-programmers.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=161762

David

 

[Sonny Jim]

The data sources for the combo boxes are loading with the form, Rich. David, I'm not sure if I follow you. I have copied both back-end and front-end to my local drive, linked them together, and it runs fine. This however was with all of the data.

 

[Sonny Jim]

(How do I skip a line and create a new paragraph in this forum?)

 

[Sonny Jim]

It turns out that there was a problem with our Internet service. The upload speed from the server's site was 276 Mbps. We have DSL and it is usually around 730 Mbps. Our network guy's explanation was that I broke the Access application somehow with my programming. I insisted that our poor upload speed must have an effect on the database performance off-site and he went off heralding that he solved the problem. Anyways, thank you guys for your help! You gave me some very good design information!

 

[gemma-the-husky]

are you connecting to a backend over a wan?

you will certainly find performance will suffer

it will work, but may/will be quite slow - you have to construct queries as carefully as possible to minimisae the amount of data being transferred over the network.

 

[RuralGuy]

A LAN runs about 100 times faster than a WAN. Most people had to go to something like Citrix to get acceptable performance over a WAN.