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assuming all other network infrastructure is fixed, what host machine factors are relevant as far as network performance in serving a quickbooks company file over lan?

host is a win10 machine used solely to host the quickbooks company file (~100-500MB) accessed by ~15 concurrent users - not sure what protocol quickbooks uses.

what factors - such as those listed below - affect network performance:

  • nic
  • hdd
  • ram
  • cpu

just installed a very fast pcie ssd. the cpu is is a 6th gen core i5 and there is 8gb ram. wondering if more ram and cpu are relevant.

vulgarbulgar
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  • I don't understand. Is this a question? If so, what is the question? – joeqwerty Feb 27 '18 at 18:58
  • what host machine factors are relevant? – vulgarbulgar Feb 27 '18 at 18:59
  • Relevant to what? – joeqwerty Feb 27 '18 at 19:00
  • serving the qb file over network – vulgarbulgar Feb 27 '18 at 19:00
  • I don't understand. Are you having a problem running QB or are you asking what factors are relevant to running QB? If the latter, all of them are relevant. Please rewrite your question to provide some detail and clarity as to what it is you're trying to ask. – joeqwerty Feb 27 '18 at 19:02
  • updated original question. – vulgarbulgar Feb 27 '18 at 19:04
  • Normally, I'd suggest benchmarking the process to get a baseline, but having worked with Quickbooks, I can pretty confidently proclaim that the problem is Quickbooks, or at least how it's being used. That being said, your "question" is still a long way from being answerable. If you don't know, and don't have enough details to figure it out, what do you expect a bunch of strangers on the internet to be able to do? – HopelessN00b Feb 27 '18 at 19:05
  • yes. not really having a problem per se - just trying to optimize host - and wanted to know if more cpu or ram would make any difference. – vulgarbulgar Feb 27 '18 at 19:06
  • more of a boilerplate question - since i am not sure how quickbooks serves the file on the lan (the protocol), would adding more cpu or ram to the host make a difference in network performance. – vulgarbulgar Feb 27 '18 at 19:16
  • QB doesn't use any specific application layer protocol. It connects via TCP to specific QB related ports. – joeqwerty Feb 28 '18 at 02:42

1 Answers1

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You're question is very poorly laid out, but I'm going to assume the following:

Users with Quickbooks are complaining that it's slow to load/save/etc.

Step 1: Make sure all machines are connected to the LAN via Gigabit Ethernet and not WiFi. WiFi is great and all and it would probably work, but it's not ideal, especially for an office environment with potentially heavy load

Step 2: Make sure the Server hosting the SMB and Quickbooks file is also on Gigabit Ethernet.

Step 3: Make sure all of the local machines aren't 15 years old and have recently new hardware; ideally SSD's. They should also have at least 16GB of RAM (if not more) to be able to handle the load of the OS and the Quickbooks application and the large file they have to open for modification.

Step 4: The only way to speed up the delivery of such a file from the server, would be to ensure that the disk speed is fast enough to access the file and serve it via the NIC at the highest possible throughput. Make sure the disks are fast (if not using SSD), possibly in a RAID array (which is NOT a backup) and that the server isn't also under heavy load from other tasks.

Step 5: Make sure there's a good amount of RAM on the server to be able to handle the multiple open sessions.

Step 6: Make sure the server is local to the users. Aka, it's not over some site-to-site VPN or cloud-hosted thing.

Assuming Step 1, 2 and 3, the bottleneck will likely be how fast the file can be read into memory for SMB to deliver to the clients (Step 3). You can only do so much to make this as fast as possible before the costs outweigh the gain.

As a side-note, it doesn't sound like this "server" is really a server, and just more a less a workstation with the role of a server. You may need to invest in actual hardware designed for this task. If you're running Windows with 8GB hosting this file to 15 clients at 500MB a pop, you're already at a loss. If this is Windows Server with 8GB, you really need to bump that up. If you're going to run a server, it should also not be an i5 for production services; at least an i7, if not Xeon class. This setup is fine for small office needs, but it seems that you have exceed the capabilities of what it can handle.

Working directly off of an SMB share (or any network share) is rarely considered a viable working solution. Typically the recommendations are to make a local copy, do the edits, and then copy that back to the share.

Now, with all of that said, contact Quickbooks and see what solutions they offer for this. I highly doubt they designed the application to work in this method (maybe? maybe not? I'm not a Quickbooks user/administrator) but they very well may have a product that's more suited to this type of usage that doesn't require that the user load the file across the network every time they need to make a change.

Andrew
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  • To further complicate matters, Quickbooks uses (or maybe just can use) Office plugins to present information to individual users, so I've seen situation where a Quickbooks server is using some Excel plugin/API to mangle up some 250 MB report into an Excel workbook, which a user is downloading, editing in Excel, and uploading back, over their VPNed home DSL connection, and complaining that the server isn't powerful enough because it's taking 3 hours to update an entry in Quickbooks. #$%@ing users. – HopelessN00b Feb 27 '18 at 19:09
  • no issues. just trying to optimize network performance as far as qb host. everyone on lan connects via 10gb ethernet, and all machines have 32gb ram - latest core i7, etc. main point was for me to understand if more cpu or ram would make a difference on the host itself. – vulgarbulgar Feb 27 '18 at 19:11
  • Oh my lord thats sounds horrible! I've always heard of many things just not happy with Quickbooks over the network. @hopelessn00b – Andrew Feb 27 '18 at 19:13
  • i am not entirely sure that samba is the protocol used- updated the question. however - also a quickbooks limitation - it is not possible to host the file locally when in multi-user mode - which is a requirement of the office itself. – vulgarbulgar Feb 27 '18 at 19:13
  • @vulgarbulgar There's your answer. The way you tell it, the product has requirements that directly conflict with the way it's being used. You either need a new product that meets those requirements (and good luck with that, accountants can never seem to port their spreadsheets between products for some reason), or your users need to start using it in a way that respects the product's requirements/limitations. – HopelessN00b Feb 27 '18 at 19:16
  • i may have misstated something, however, the product is being used as intended. the company file is hosted on a computed designated as host by quickbooks. when multiple users access the host and edit the file qb file- this is done is the so-called 'multi-user' mode. meaning, since there are multiple users, the file cannot be copied to the user's computer while being edited, and then returned to the host before another can repeat the process. – vulgarbulgar Feb 27 '18 at 19:19
  • also- there are no third party plugins or software currently being used. to restate i think the question is more about host performance and whether cpu and ram would help in this case- though i don't know what protocol qb uses for sharing the file. – vulgarbulgar Feb 27 '18 at 19:21
  • Pretty much all of the points I laid out would help with the system. Having a really fast PCI-e SSD is definitely good, but I'm not sure how that would hold up to 15 simultaneous users. In my opinion, the specs on the server are low grade for something like this. – Andrew Feb 27 '18 at 19:23
  • found this - https://help.quickbooks.intuit.com/en_US/kb/system-requirements-quickbooks-2018-enterprise-solutions-180/000044341_en_US:SALESFORCE.modal -indeed, looks like adding more memory especially would benefit. – vulgarbulgar Feb 27 '18 at 19:33