Now this was difficult to solve.

Customers’ accountant had upgraded to MYOB Premier, so that it should run over the network, and be accessed by 2 or 3 different PCs (Although it was still going to be used mainly from just 1 PC).

I get called a few weeks later, and get asked to look into the “server” because MYOB is running slow, and sometimes just wouldn’t even open the database file.

Apparently, the accountant had said she had setup MYOB Premier in many different environments, and she had never encountered any speed problems… in hindsight, I shouldn’t have trusted this nugget of useless information.

Since the server was just a windows XP home PC (but a reasonably quick Acer 3.2Ghz P4 system), I ended up doing a lot of stuffing around creating a “proper” server, only to find that the new environment had created other difficult issues (see my previous post on using linux as a file and print server).

In the end, I found a few things that resulted in a solution:

• When MYOB starts, I changed the default protocol from NetBeui to TCP/IP (some say NetBeui is faster, but at that stage, I was willing to try anything).
• Both the server and the main MYOB PC had Gigabit network cards, but the router ran at 100Mbit… I installed an Asus Gigabit switch between the server and the wired PC, so they would run at full Gigabit speeds.

After that, MYOB seemed to run “reasonably”, and with none of the original problems.

After some further research, I found that MYOB (probably because its not efficient at working over a network) can shuffle huge amounts of data across the network… so running Gigabit would have helped a lot.

I suspect that the amount of data transferred might be related to the size of the company database… and in this case, the company file was reasonably large (about 30 Mb).

A difficult problem to solve, and for the first time: a customer that wasn’t happy about the “size” of my invoice… But that’s another story.