Pervasive SQL Workgroup For Windows

[Kevin Smith]

What PVSW are you running - V10? There is a 64bit workgroup V13. You will need to purchase the upgrade from Sage - +- R80 per pvsw user as far as I recall.
After a total network change like that, there are a few things to check. What Antivirus are you running? Have you set the exclusions for the PVSW processes and the network shares (both on the server and the workstations)?
Have you confirmed your network speeds - are the NIC's reporting at 100 megs or 1Gb? Sometimes the wrong network driver on a machine can lead to it reporting at 1000 but it only has 100 throughput.
Typically PVSW 32bit will only use 1 core/thread on your processor (so I was told in the past - I can't confirm that though). The older machines generally had larger processors with fewer threads - so the old machine was running at 3.2ghz and the new one is running at 1.6ghz.
There are PVSW tweaks - if you run the PCC and configure microkernel router - you can deselect SPX and NetBIOS in the communication protocols to decrease network broadcast traffic. You can also increase the IO threads and communication threads in the local engine configuration.
Windows 10 networks also have IPv6 enabled over IPv4. PVSW 10 doesn't cater for IPv6, only IPv4. This can lead to PVSW gateway issues. PVSW13 does read IPv6 traffic. There is a registry key change that can be applied to set IPv4 as the preferred protocol.

I suggest starting with the anti-virus exclusions and settings and not play around too much with PVSW, if you don't understand the settings.

[cppgenius]

Yes runnig PVSW V10, did all the checks you mentioned, network speeds have been checked and running at 100Mps... once I've set up the new network I had to configure the server Ethernet adapter by removing certain flow control limitations as well as energy saving features, because the upload speeds on the server were sometimes capped at 23Mbps, but after removing those silly flow control crap it went up to 85Mbps+ So yes I can confirm network is running at optimal speed. Tried adding Pervasive to the exclusion list, running AVG Antivirus, both on the server and client... and that did not resolve the issue either...

But you happened to point me into the right direction by mentioning Pervasive Control Center. So I browsed through the different settings and under Local Client->Microkernel Router there is a Performance tuning option which tells Microkernel Router to use the local Cache Engine to access a remote file. This works like a charm, now Pastel Payroll is much faster, as if we are running it directly on the server. From my understanding this loads the database from the server into the local cache memory and whenever something is needed from the db, pervasive loads it first from the local cache... I presume that as I make changes this is also written back to the local cache and then back to the server at a later stage? Not sure if there are any risks involved in using this local cache performance tuning, but now Payroll runs really smooth on every client where I enable this feature. Although this had the most significant effect on performance I still added pervasive to the exclusion list of the anti-virus just to squeeze that little extra performance out of the database engine.

Thanks a lot for pointing me into the right direction Kevin, hope this post will also help other users with Pastel Payroll performance issues.