Performance Tweaks

Like all software, PTS 5 is not immune to occasional temporary performance issues.

Symptoms

Various functions of the PTS application take an unsatisfactory amount of time to load or to process.

Common causes

1. The database has grown large and the data has become fragmented.
2. Printer settings are not optimal.
3. Prescriptions are not being cleared from users homepages and the server cannot cope with the large volume of them.
5. Other software on a shared server is hogging resources.
6. An unoptimised or expensive third party query is hitting the PTS database.
7. The server/s only meet the bare minimum hardware requirements.
8. PTS is trying to reach tmsinsight.com for support contract and software licensing notifications, but your PTS server has no access to the internet.

Solutions

1. Index the PTS database. In addition, performance can be degraded if the physical file size of the database does not fit entirely in system memory.
2. Turn off bi-directional support. This is a setting under the Ports tab in the printer properties of each of your label printers.
   (Please do not underestimate the performance impact of this setting even if you have never heard of it before)
3. Consider whether your prescription types are set up correctly so that they clear automatically when finished. Also see how to clear lots of prescriptions at once.
   We very frequently see PTS configured in such a way that prescription types are marked to require collection, but "collection" is never actually recorded. When a user view is configured to return completed, but uncollected prescriptions, this configuration ultimately results in PTS constantly trying to load a list of ever growing uncollected prescriptions until eventually the server cannot cope with the load. See this page for more.
4. Use a resource monitor or the SQL performance dashboard to identify the application at fault and then contact the manufacturer.
5. Use SQL performance dashboard to identify the expensive query and have IT or the manufacturer optimise it and/or reduce its frequency.
   (This issue seems to be becoming more common, please test your queries for performance at scale before rollout)
6. Consider upgrading your server hardware to the recommended PTS 5 specification.
7. In Setup > Application Settings, locate the "skip checking if PTS is online" setting (OFFLINE) and set to Yes. This tells PTS not to attempt any remote connections.