SBS 2003 RAM

[steve wilson]

Hi,
I currently have a server running Windows SBS 2003 which basically runs sage line 50 accounts software and stores Microsoft Office documents. It has a 3 hard drive raid array which are SCSI (it was built about 5-6 years ago). I have two 3.06 GHZ xeon processors in it with 4 x 512mb of PC 2100 DDR 266 inside. The server can take up to 16GB of memory.

Will increasing the memory from 2GB to 4GB make a difference to the performance of the server or would more hard drives benefit it more?

Thanks for any help.

Regards
Steve

 

[fleshconsumed]

Check the memory usage? If it's close or over the limit, I'd add more RAM.

 

[steve wilson]

Thanks for the reply.

I'm not sure how to do this. I've looked at the performance tab in task manager, but i'm not sure what to look for. Please can you tell me what it is I should look for.

 

[Nothinman]

Where are you seeing performance problems?

 

[fleshconsumed]

Open Task manager, it will have PF Usage or Memory Usage bar and graph on Performance Tab. That's your memory usage. If it's close or over 2GB, which is how much ram you said you have in a server - upgrade it.

 

[steve wilson]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Where are you seeing performance problems?

I have problems when i bring up the customer or supplier modules of the sage program. Sometimes my computer can be very slow on start up also. After that it is very quick.

 

[Nothinman]

Are you running sage locally and connecting to a database on the server or running it on the server? Are you sure it's not your machine that's slow?

 

[steve wilson]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Are you running sage locally and connecting to a database on the server or running it on the server? Are you sure it's not your machine that's slow?

We have 9-10 computers on the network and all are showing the same problems. My computer is a 6 month old Dell machine which is pretty up to date and certainly faster than all the other machines. The rest of the computers are 4-5 years old.

Oh and sage is running on the server.

 

[RebateMonger]

Memory is cheap, easy to install, and you have plenty of memory slots. Get 2 GB more memory.

Assuming you have the automated daily Performance Reports enabled, it'll show you memory usage and disk usage, so you can get a quick idea what's going on.

 

[steve wilson]

Sorry for all the newbie questions, but how do I turn on the automated daily performance reports.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: steve wilson
Sorry for all the newbie questions, but how do I turn on the automated daily performance reports.

In the Home Page of the SBS Server Management, click on "Monitoring and Reporting", and then follow the instructions. By default it'll send daily server health reports and semi-weekly server usage reports.

If you haven't already enabled some sort of full system backups, then you can set up the automated SBS backups at the same time. The way that SBS Backup is set up, it'll back up the entire system by default, including any SQL and Exchange databases, as well as System State. You don't want to be without a recent System State backup if your server ever goes down.

 

[Emulex]

i thought sage50 uses smb share and old providex style database.

in that case make sure your network is unified at the same speed (all 100meg or all gigabit).

wouldn't hurt to up the ram but i'd bet that is not the solution.

run any big long/crystal reports on the server itself rather than over the net.

 

[zkaudio]

I seem to remember SBS 2003 being limited to 4gb of ram...

 

[sonoma1993]

Originally posted by: steve wilson
Hi,
I currently have a server running Windows SBS 2003 which basically runs sage line 50 accounts software and stores Microsoft Office documents. It has a 3 hard drive raid array which are SCSI (it was built about 5-6 years ago). I have two 3.06 GHZ xeon processors in it with 4 x 512mb of PC 2100 DDR 266 inside. The server can take up to 16GB of memory.

Will increasing the memory from 2GB to 4GB make a difference to the performance of the server or would more hard drives benefit it more?

Thanks for any help.

Regards
Steve

even if you add 16GB of memory to the server. SBS2003 is limited to only 4GB of ram. But yeah, increasing the ram to 4GB will help the performance.

 

[Nothinman]

But yeah, increasing the ram to 4GB will help the performance.

You can't say that without any real details. His problem could easily be related to disk or network I/O speeds.