As regular readers will know, I don’t think much of Sage accounting software, especially Sage Line 50. It’s fatally flawed because it stores its data in disk files, shared across a network using a file server. I suspect these.DTA files are pretty much unchanged since Graham Wylie’s original effort running under CP/M on an Amstrad PCW. There is continual talk that the newer versions will use a proper database, indeed in 2006 they announced a deal to work with mySQL. But the world has been been waiting for the upgrade ever since. It’s always coming in “next year’s” release but “next year” never comes.The latest (as of December 2009) is that they’re ‘testing’ a database version with some customers and it might come out in version seventeen.
In fact it’s in Sage’s interests to keep Line 50 running slower than a slug in treacle. Line 50 is the cheap end of the range – if it ran at a decent speed over a network, multi-user, people wouldn’t buy the expensive Line 200 (aka MMS). The snag is that Line 50 is sold to small companies that do need more than one or two concurrent users and do have a significant number of transactions a day.
So why is Line 50 so slow? The problem with Sage’s strategy of storing data in shared files is that when you have multiple users the files are opened/locked/read/written by multiple users across a network at the same time. It stands to reason. On a non-trivial set of books this will involve a good number of files, some of them very large. Networks are comparatively slow compared to local disks, and certainly not reliable, so you’re bound to end up with locked file conflicts and would be lucky if data wasn’t corrupted from time to time. As the file gets bigger and the number of users grows, the problem gets worse exponentially. The standard Sage solution seems to be to tell people their hardware in inadequate whenever timeouts occur. In a gross abuse of their consultancy position, some independent Sage vendors have been known to sell hapless lusers new high-powered servers, which does make the problem appear to go away. Until, of course, the file gets a bit bigger. Anyone who knows anything about networking will realise this straight away that this is a hopeless situation, but not those selling Sage – at least in public.
One Sage Solution Provider, realising that this system was always going to time-out in such circumstances, persuaded the MD of the company using it to generate all reports by sitting at the server console. To keep up the pretence this was a multi-user system, he even persuaded them to install it on a Windows Terminal Server machine so more than one person could use it by means of a remote session.
If that weren’t bad enough, apparently it didn’t even work when sitting at the console, and they’ve advised the customers to get a faster router. I’m not kidding – this really did happen.
The fact is that Sage Line 50 does not run well over a network due to a fundamental design flaw. It’s fine if it’s basically single-user on one machine, and I have clients using it this way. If you want to run multiple users, especially if your books are non-trivial, you need Sage 200/MMS – or a different accounting package altogether.
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As an IT Support Technician I can honestly say this problem is one of the banes of my life. Every time I see that I have to go and see a customer about Sage being slow I just want to scream “Of course it is, the whole thing is garbage!” but that wouldn’t cut the ice with them, they all think we have some magical salve that will fix all slowness issues. I loath Sage and hope that a competitor comes along with a good SQL based alternative that blows them out of their comfortable little rut so that they either fix their product or go bust!
I have been in I T Support since 1982, working for the likes of BT, Barclays, RBS, Nationwide, Tescos as well as single users working out of their back bedroom. I have worked with Sage since the days when it came on a single 5.25 floppy and they got you to buy additional utilites at the training courses. I am aware of the inherent network speed issues and the reasons, I have also found many ways of overcoming them. But now I’m stumped, Sage on WIndows 7 is abominable. I’ve tried every available trick and have searched long and hard across the internet and technical forums without any luck. Sage states “there is no problem we are aware of with Sage on windows 7″ The web would beg to differ, Other than downgrading to XP or upgrrding the accounts software any ideas would be appreciated.
AJ and others.
We have found that the following “fixes” various flavours of Sage, and various performance issues.
1) exclude all of the Sage files from being scanned by AV on server and desktop.
2) make your shiny new VISTA/WIN7/SERVER 2008 (inc SBS) use SMB 1, in other words disable SMB 2 on all computers/servers.
In our experience this makes the system much more useable (not perfect, because it cant be if its written like it is!)). Its still terrible that we have to make these changes to suit Sage, but it this is what we have found with 3 separate networks that run Sage, all with variations of the above OS software.
Just thought I should update everyone, after telling them I had a special contact at Sage that was assisting me in my Line 50 struggle.
Sage have clearly decided I’ve ran out of guarantee and have refused to help fix a standard Sage error (loss of cumulative balances on customer statements) preferring to tell me that “someone” in my office has opened the statement to edit it and changed the details – no one has and contacts on the web told me this is a well known Sage error, caused by a Sage update. Strange, I thought updates are supposed to make things better rather than worse!
Anyway, they’ll fix the error they caused in their program if I pay them to – so I went on the web, got free help that fixed it in 2 minutes flat.
People say it’s stupid to suggest Sage actually want these errors and problems to continue just to get more money and I agree. I think that line of thought probably is just a totally understandable knee-jerk reaction to the stress caused by Line 50. My experience suggests that, when these problems occur, rather than being honest and fixing them for free, they are taking the opportunity to get people to pay for Sage Cover even though this means avoiding telling their customers the truth. If this isn’t the answer, I don’t know what is – I dread to think they need the cash so badly they’re prepared to ruin their own reputation to get it.
Quote: “People say it’s stupid to suggest Sage actually want these errors and problems to continue just to get more money and I agree.” Un-quote.
Maybe there is a possibility that they may be right and they do. I have heard that they want people to keep with the support. Looking at it black and white why would anyone keep a product going that is just so bad. Jobs? Face-saving? Corporate psychopathy?
If Tesco made a product that everyone complained about it would be removed from the shelves tout-suite!
Why not the same with Sage?
Our Sage “partner” upgraded us to the latest version in April without any authorization from us. It has virtually put our whole company at a standstill for the past few months. Sage stalls with every operation at every workstation with messages such as: (Waiting to open file ACCDTA). A workstation could stall for anything between 5 mins up to an over an hour. Sometimes sage just vanishes from the screen and you have to log-on again, remove the user that was logged on and hope for the best. This regularly causes data corruption which means we are checking data + doing back-ups twice a day – a process which takes an hour each time. We’ve upgraded our hardware memory + power at the sage “partners” request and at a cost of 1000.00 euro. We’ve cleared down 10′s of thousands of transactions bring it well below the recommended limit. We’ve tinkered with + adjusted antivirus software as recommended. None of all this has brought about any improvement. Invoices are going out between 10 + 30 days late, same applies to statements. Using the sage program is the single largest cause of stress within our company and has been our largest challenge since it was first installed back in 2001. If sage have such a large customer-base, it comes as no surprise to me that the world is always on the brink of financial meltdown. I am seriously considering returning to manual book-keeping.
Mark,
A lot smaller company we had exactly the same problems, excluded every sage folder we could find on server and client from virus scan, all sorts of tweaks and tricks but the thing that we hadn’t done which solved most of our problems was to disable real time virus scanning on .dta file types. as soon as these file types were excluded from checking our problems vanished.
We were using eset antivirus, win 7 clients and win 2003 server.
Hi Jon,
Below is the response form our IT guy:
We have done this.
There are a couple of metrics on the other page you sent that might
lead in the right direction, though.
http://www.sbslimited.co.uk/AV.htm
That page would seem to indicate that Avast Home (which is related to
the AV we use) has a pretty substantial impact on file access times,
regardless of whether files are excluded, or even if the AV engine
itself is disabled completely.
The only way to confirm or refute this is to uninstall the AV from all
the workstations and do some testing.
If this is the case, I will be looking to the manufacturers for a
refund, and we will have to go with another AV solution.
- I’ll let you know if this is the solution to our problems.
Regards
Mark
Thanks Jon, I’ll check it out + let you know if your suggestion helps.
Mark
Take a look at the SMB2 problem I mentioned somewhere in this comments section. If your servers are 2008 or 2008 R2 and your clients are Vista or Windows 7, then you should consider disabling SMB2 on your network.
+ adding DTA to your exclusions + the other helpful stuff in this comments list.
If anyone is in any doubt, it appears that Sage have done some serious work on Sage Line 50 2012. We have customers reporting very positive performance improvements after install and data conversion.
[Ed: Personally I'd like something more than hear-say, but interesting]
about six years ago we got updated from sage line 100 to mms and have had nothing but problems since. We pay about £1000 per year for a new licence but in the six years have never go a update. Were do we go from here