Tips on Speeding

I am not normally the one to offer technical tips for Time Manager – I leave that to the Helpdesk and the techies in the back office here at Pillar.

But there’s one area I feel really needs reiterating and that is the impact of flexi-time recording on Event entry, particularly on slower connections or networks.

Here are my top 2 things to do right now if you have speed issues and yet still wish to use Time Manager’s zero-entry innate flexi-recording facility.

1. Turn ON ad-hoc manual Recalc.
   This will stop recalculation of flexi every time you enter a new Event, and give you control of when YOU want to refresh the flexi balance. Stopping the flexi calculation will increase the speed it takes to write an Event to file/screen as there simply is less for the system to do.
2. Reduce the breadth of the Flexi re-calc
   Get Time Manager to only look forward enough to reflect what you actually find useful.

I explain both of these in a bit more detail below. But if you have any questions, e-mail us at support@profess.co.uk

And, don’t forget to cast your vote in the Speed vs Features debate.

Ad-hoc Manual Re-calculation of Flexi-time balance (Journal view)

This is controlled by a global setting (meaning the same will apply for all users of the Journal view, i.e. it is NOT a My Settings personal option), and can be located via menu path Administration > Validation {tab}: Update Flexi-time on entry of each Event.

Un-check this option to turn ON manual ad-hoc recalculation of the flexi-time balance; a new Update button will appear to the right of the Flexi summary line at the top of the Journal view (although you will have to Refresh for it appear straight away).

Now Events will be created and only the Working Hours updated (along with the standard validation). This makes entry much quicker, especially when entering time by dragging favourites into the Journal grid. Absolutely no flexi calculation will take place.

But if you want the Flexitime to be refreshed to show the latest picture, just hit the Update button to force a complete Flexi refresh along the summary line for the current week in edit.

Reduce the Breadth of the Flexi Re-calculation (Journal view)

Time Manager allows you to set how far you want the calculation to read into the future. Realistically, planned leave aside, most people will have noted that the current day’s Flexi balance will be displayed in lieu of how much time is booked today. The Flexi b/f from yesterday or last week is the true reflection of time in credit/debit coming into today, but until today is finished I won’t know what my balance is. So, by extension, why complicate unnecessarily by having Time Manager read a number of days into the future. So I recommend reducing the figure held in Administration > Validation {tab}: Extend Flexi-time Calculation X days beyond the end of the current week.

Personally, I’d set this to 3 merely to catch the start of next week, but only if I am using TM for forward planning work (where I place Events into the future and, thus see what my Flexi balance will be based on my prediction of how long I am working for). If I wasn’t doing that I’d set it to 0. However, remember this is a global value, so the rule applies to ALL users on the database.

And, of course, you might not get the setting right for your office straight away. But certainly try and reduce the number to see if you get improved performance without any loss of functionality.

Quicker Picklists

New in the next release of Time Manager.

A number of performance improvements have been made in this release. Where possible, drop down lists for Projects and Activities are now cached so that they do not need retrieving from the database each time they are requested. This caching occurs only when you request the full list and not when you are filtering it by typing a search value in.

How fast is fast?

One of the questions we always get asked is how can you speed up Time Manager.  It’s funny, but sometimes this get asked even when there are no real resons for it.  Time Manager is a web application – not a webiste, but a full blown application that just happens to run through a browser.  This means that when something needs to be saved, calculated or updated, most of this goes on at the server end.  If you are connected to our hosted version of Time Manager, that is a server in a data centre in Manchester operated by UKFast.  If you have Time Manager installed locally that’s an application server on your own intranet.

Anyway, wherever the server is, that’s where most of the processing goes on.  While this is happening, your browser is doing nothing, other than displaying a little whirly thing at the top and maybe a progress bar (of sorts) at the bottom.   If processing takes too long (usually more than 20 minutes), the browser stops responding.

One of the areas that people have found particularly slow is the Costing or Recosting of Time.  There are a couple of reasons for this, but the main one is that in the past we have performed this by reading each time entry, looking up how it needs to be costed, calculating a charge and saving the entry back out.  Repeat for the next record, and the next, and the next…

If you have 200,000 records, you can see why this is slow.

Well, I’ve been getting around to seeing what can be done about this, and I’m pleased to say that a major enhancement in costing is going to take place in a near future release. 

It’s not a case of simply running a SQL script, because there are so many places where you can override the default costing method for an individual, a Project, a Sub Project and so on.  So I spent some time looking at how all this works, gone back to the drawing board and come up with a much better way of handling costing.  At the same time I’ve given you more flexibility, so you can now just recost for a selected time period, one project, one member of staff etc.

These change will definitely be in the 2010 Quarter 3 release due at the end of Septmeber, but because it offers so many benefits, we’ll also slip it into an interim release before then.  When the enhancement is ready you’ll get an email telling you all about the new version, and it will be automatically uploaded to our hosted server.

So far I’m only in the testing phase of this work, but the exciting thing is we have tried it on a couple of large data sets.

Current Costing Operation: 20 minutes

New Costing Operation: 4 minutes

Not bad going.  I won’t bore you with the details of how we have achieved this, and I can’t promise similar improvements elsewhere – we have just worked out a far more efficient method of achieving the same result in this particular instance.  However, I can promise that everything we do will be tailored to make your experience with Time Manager the best you can have.

Speed

One of the biggest problems reported by Time Managers users is speed. There can be many reasons for this, but the most common is a slow network connection. A way to identify whether your network is slow is to run the following test and check your Ping rate.

Go to http://speedtest.net and click on the Begin Test Now button. This will run a useful Speed test which will tell you your Download speed, your upload speed and, most importantly, your Ping rate. 

Another site you could try is www.pingtest.net. This site is similar to Speedtest.net, but it will tell you if you have a good connection for Web Applications. When you are on this site click on the Learn More option when hovering over the PING results.

Our office averages 36ms. Go on, what’s yours…?

Trust your Time Manager

With today’s ever increasing need for online security it would be of no surprise to find that everything your computer does regarding the Internet (or even Intranet) is monitored for viruses and potential threats.

This will have an effect on Time Manager which is constantly passing information back and forth, all of which is getting checked. This will slow down Time Manager’s processes quite a lot.

What you can do is to set Time Manager as a trusted site. This will reduce the level of monitoring.

For more information on speed optimization please contact the Pillar Helpdesk on 01531 821199 or support@profess.co.uk

Each Virus checker is different so you may need to speak to your IT department to make sure that the correct site is trusted.