A couple years ago we had tremendous problems with slow Ultratax response time. We found a solution (see below) by installing a SanDisk IO drive. This worked great until last week, when the board crashed, and now we find this board has been discontinued. Does anyone have a good solution that they use? I am feeling a lot of pressure to move to virtual office, but am concerned about reports of downtime (and the dramatic increase in cost).
Here's the discussion item that describes the problem and the original solution:
Bsquared This person is a Verified Professional Apr 7, 2016 at 10:40 AM
This was a write up by the IT guest speaker at the Thomson user conference.
The UltraTax speed problems with crashing, print preview, the Efile status, and e-filing are usually caused by latency to access the client data files. This is a problem with the server latency and memory or upgrades to the end user desktop should make no difference. On complicated returns especially multistate returns the amount of read and write request goes up exponentially and can cause significant time waiting and the greyed out not responding message. The fix for this is to address server latency.Average drives can have a 30 millisecond latency to return data. SSD’s are faster, but they vary. What we did to improve speed was use a Fusion IO card. These cards speeds are measured in microseconds ( millionths of a second) instead of milliseconds(thousandths of a second) which allows storage latency to approach 0 for all practical purposes. In specific cases of large complicated returns we were able to cut print preview time by 97%. In general though our print preview time is cut about 80%. The case study we did with SanDisk can be found here.https://www.sandisk.com/business/datace ... the-tax-... speed issue is not only in print preview, but also in the electronic filing system. A large return may only be transmitting data to Thomson for seconds, but we and some firms we have worked with have seen e-file sessions that took over an hour. In one specific case we had a transmission that took over 2 hours the previous year and after our upgrade took 12 minutes. All areas of the program see improvement, for example our proformas of over 4000 returns took less than three hours this year for all returns.This applies to the entire CS Suite. File Cabinet speeds increases dramatically. With a 120GB File Cabinet database we had some client data that took 45 minutes to pull up before this upgrade. File Cabinet now runs in real time. There are no delays, and we moved away form a SQL implementation because it runs faster without the SQL database and allows a simpler backup model.The important take away is that most speed issues on the CS Suite can be addressed by fixing latency, not by RAM or processor power at the client end. If you fix the bottle neck at the server end a tablet can give better results than the fastest workstation machine can connected to a server with standard storage.