Checkout slowing to a halt
Hi all,
We're running Checkout 3.5.5 (Build C3-7767) on a dual core mid-2007 iMac with 6GB RAM, on OS X 10.7.4. We have a wool, crafts & haberdashery shop, selling many small items each day, and have been running the system since July 2011.
The app seems to be slowly grinding to a halt. The average delay between clicking "Pay" and the till opening/receipt printing is now 14 seconds... which seems like an eternity when you've got a queue of customers waiting to be served. It can be longer still, and we have taken to making sure we've always got a key for the cash drawer about us, to keep things moving. It's all a bit embarrassing, and we've had the conversation about alternative POS solutions several times… quite daunting and less than ideal (especially if it's a non-Mac based solution)!
It's worth mentioning that this doesn't seem to be an OS X related thing - all other apps are running fine and fast. We've got a super broadband connection here in town (not that we've got Enstore attached to Checkout) and don't run dozens of other apps at the same time. I'm pretty hot on keeping the iMac up to date, clean, repaired etc… so I'm fairly certain this is a Checkout thing. This slowness has got progressively worse - it used to be that it would creep up on us as the day went by and relaunching the app helped gee it back up, but no longer. It's slow from the start, and stays slow.
In terms of our practice, we run one store and the database.checkout file is 215 MB large. We get through around 50 transactions a day, averaging 4(ish) products per sale. Since opening we have 12,959 transactions recorded.
There are 665 customers on the system (although Sales get put through anonymously - those are for orders) and when we run the stock report, we're told we have 7,552 products. Being a wool shop, I'd say around 20% of these are variations. Some items of haberdashery have up to 100 variations of colours on the system (even if we don't stock them all).
Day to day, we find the way the business is run - with numerous small items going through constantly - we generally have all three windows open: Sales + Manager + Stock. I've read elsewhere that having the stock room window open can slow things down, but I can't imagine how we'd manage without it, as checking/putting stuff on/receiving purchase orders is all part and parcel of our workflow.
So, can anybody help with ways of optimising performance:
a) On a day to day basis?
b) Longer term (re: database optimisation)?
….or have we backed the wrong horse with Checkout, for this kind of commerce?
Thanks for any suggestions
Giles
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Support Staff 2 Posted by CO Michele on 09 Jan, 2013 01:44 PM
Giles,
We are currently in the process of testing a beta release (3.5.6) that solves this issue. The issue is related to the algorithm that was implemented on how to calculate cost/margin. In the upcoming weeks we will probably announce a public beta of this release. This release will dramatically increase the cost algorithm and also reduce the memory usage.
But we have a temporary work around, we made a special build that just disable cost/margins calculations:
https://checkoutapp.com/checkout/beta/Checkout-07768-3.5.5.dmg
As soon as 3.5.6 gets released, it will during migration recalculates all the cost and margins values for all your transactions.
Regards,
Michele
Checkout Support
3 Posted by gpcroft on 09 Jan, 2013 04:05 PM
Thanks Michele, this sounds promising. We'll have a discussion here about whether to try the workaround or wait for the next release. If we try the workaround, I'll let you know if it fixes the problem from our end.
G
4 Posted by tom on 11 Jan, 2013 09:53 PM
Hi,
If you have a small amount of fast sellers you could delete them and re create them.
This helps a lot but this specific problem also seems to be fixed in the new release. The old version is way slower with fast sellers then slow sellers.
I'm also running on a older ( 2008) mac mini but I did change to a solid state disk.
I can highly recommend using SSD drive on checkout, also if you need a reboot it will be so much faster on ssd, i wish I had put mine in earlier.
Rgds,
T
Support Staff 5 Posted by CO Michele on 17 Jan, 2013 01:11 PM
Giles,
Checkout 3.5.6 update has been released. This update has resolved the issues with performance and accuracy regarding product costs and margins.
Details regarding the release are posted on our blog at this link
https://checkoutapp.com/post/40539162990/checkout-3-5-6-january...
Regards,
Michele
Checkout Support
CO Michele closed this discussion on 17 Jan, 2013 01:11 PM.