I just added a workstation to my account; we went from single user to 2 users. When I sign in under multiple user, even if I'm the only user on the system, things slow to a crawl. Today I timed a "Find Transaction" search for a 2-week period in my checking account. Under single-user it took about 2 seconds. Then I logged out and logged back in under multiple-user (again, I'm the only one on the system at this point). This time the same search took 16 seconds!!!

I called Support, and "Andrew" said he hasn't heard of this problem before. He had me Optimize my file, which I did, but nothing has changed.

I'm using Accountedge 2007 on a Macintosh system. Our computers are less than a year old, running Intel chips, 2 Mhz or faster, OS 10.4.11.

This is totally unacceptable for us. Is it time to see if I can get my money back?? I just spent $400 to get the 2008 upgrade when it comes out, and complete support. If this is the best MYOB can do, I'd much rather spend my $400 on Quickbooks or something and ditch this mess.

Any advice?

We have an Apple networked system with up to four MYOB users. I too have been frustrated with the slow down in performance going to multi-user, which we did over a year ago.

I had noted one thing though that gave me hope, with the lead up to Leopard ...and that's the promise of more efficient networking. Initially this was not feasible to try with a completely Leopard system (due to the file-connect issue).

However, with the just updated file-connect installed (allowing me to use leopard host and workstation) I am noticing quite a nice improvement. The bank and sales registers open within seconds, even in multi-user mode. This used to take at least 30 seconds with my file.

So my advice would be to upgrade to Leopard on your machines, and install the new version of file-connect.

Did you ever find out if the advised helped with speed? We are thinking of moving to the 2008 version but SPEED is our number 1 concern.

I haven't tried yet. We're still bumbling along in single-user mode. I've had so many issues with Leopard lately that Accountedge is the least of my worries. I received the 2008 version recently, though, so I'll give it a try and let you know what I find.

We are likewise VERY concerned about multi-user speed. MYOB has always been virtually unusable as multi-user, so it is humorous that an MYOB support person would say they never heard of the problem. A search of these forums would likely show that this has been a major issue for a long time.

We are very curious if 2008 will do anything for network speed. Quickbooks is not the answer. We were considering going to Windows Quickbooks but a look at their user forum showed the same exact issue -- frustrated users when more than one person was using it.

We will be switching from MYOB in the next few weeks if we cannot resolve the speed issue with 2008, so I am anxious to hear from users who have upgraded.

in my opinion, the 2008 version didn't improve anything with the speed issue. pathetic is the word that is used most often in our office.

Hi there,

I notice that you're using Leopards and Cougars so I presume you're using Mac versions of MYOB.

Perhaps I can offer some experience from our use of MYOB on a standard Windows network. We had 18 users running off a gigabit lan system, and in general everything worked fine.

We had some significant speed issues initially however, and we finally tracked it down to the protocols that fly backwards and and forwards through the lan system. We found that the Windows firewall was blocking and checking a lot of the MYOB traffic, slowing things down to a crawl.

Once we finally tracked down the problem and exempted the MYOB program from Windows firewall, things started to work fine.

I am sure that the Mac OS would have similar (if not better) traffic inspection that you might have to tweak?

I do hope this helps.

Kind regards

quote:

Originally posted by LAS:
We are likewise VERY concerned about multi-user speed. MYOB has always been virtually unusable as multi-user, so it is humorous that an MYOB support person would say they never heard of the problem. A search of these forums would likely show that this has been a major issue for a long time.

Indeed. In fact, it's almost unbelievable. It's a known issue. MYOB's standard recommendation is to throw a lot of expensive hardware at the problem, but the real issue is MYOB running peer-to-peer. In some applications, with small company files, fast computers, etc., this can work acceptably.

However, peer-to-peer requires that most users (all but one, the one sitting on the company file host, if that is a user computer) access the entire company file over the network. If something requires, say, searching the company file, the file itself must cross the network. Make that a 100MB company file, and you've got trouble. There is a classic solution, which is Client/Server, i.e., there is a program running on the computer hosting the file which can do all the access, and only send results to the client. Programs can be designed to do this, but ... MYOB is not. However, the same thing happens if one is running full terminal server software, i.e., where the host actually runs client programs for the client, and all that goes across the network is keyboard, mouse, and display data. I do this, as do many others, with a Server Edition of Windows, I'm running Windows 2000 Server. It works perfectly, even though MYOB says they "don't support it." They don't support it because they don't want to get into the technical issues of supporting a server application, I'm sure. They think that their target customer base doesn't want that, that is supposedly for big companies. I think they are incorrect. It may be worth going to client/server with just two users, if they are both heavy users. Most of the expense of doing this is the labor of setup, which for many customers will mean paying an expert. I did it myself, though a friend did help me at one point. Total cost: $200 for Windows 2000 Server. Bonus: I can run *other* programs the same way, all of our company activity can be on one computer, and then all backed up at once, I can access and use any of this, including MYOB, over the internet, *and dialup is fast enough*, which was nice when I was living out in the sticks.

Take a look at the wiki for MYOB users: http://myob-users.org. There is a discussion there of how to do it.

(And, yes, Mac users can keep their Macs, and use them as terminals to access a Windows Server. (MYOB *may* give users with the Mac software who want to run everything on a server, the Windows edition. I don't know. But they should.) There are rumors -- described in the wiki -- that there is a similar pure Mac solution. Not being a Mac user, I'm not qualified to verify that.)

quote:

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I installed AE 2008 on one of my Leopard Macs just before I went on vacation last month. What a disaster. The computer froze up completely and we had to remove some preference files using a firewire cable and disk target mode to get it going again. All this happened literally hours before I was to fly out on a two week vacation. I told our office gal to avoid AE 08 until we returned and I had time to look at it. From what I'm reading here, it doesn't sound too promising though, at least in multi-user mode.

Any other Leopard users out there with something positive to share?

AE 2008 is inoperably slow on our network too in 2-user mode.

VERSION: AccountEdge Plus 2008 Great Britain release 12.1.0G
PROBLEM: MYOB is inoperably slow in multi-user mode. Takes very many seconds for a ticked box for example to appear ticked on screen, or for a list to appear, sometimes a client freezes. It took 45 minutes to process one order this morning (in single user it would take less than 5 mins) and over an hour to reconcile a bank account (which would normally have taken 20 minutes).
HARDWARE: Server Mac OS X 10.4.11 2.x 3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon, 4GB RAM
Clients: 2 x iMac 2.16 Ghz Intel Core Duo running OS X 10.4.1, 2GB RAM
DATAFILE: 67 MB. End of Year clear out and data optimization done last week.
NETWORK: Gigabit Ethernet.

I tried Daniel's helpful suggestion and turned off the firewall but there was no difference.

Has anyone tried running MacOS Server software rather than the conventional OS? Do you think that might help? Daniel mentions that MYOB is running peer-to-peer, but is that so for the Mac version? The Mac version has always required the data to be hosted on a separate machine to the kit running the application.

Cheers
Phil

Now that all my office Macs are upgraded to Leopard, I tried using multi-user mode again yesterday (AE2008). All of our computers are new this year so they're plenty fast enough.

Nothing has improved. The program doesn't crash anymore, but it takes upwards of 30 seconds to post a single checkbook entry! This is absolutely nuts. I talked to tech support today and they at least admitted there was a problem and they're "working on it."

My question: I don't have faith in the usability of this program anytime in the near future so I'd like to get my money back for the MU upgrade I paid for last fall. Any tips on how I might pull that off short of a lawsuit?

Always the number one issue that MYOB won't address. I got so frustrated last year that I tried a different approach. I downloaded the regular version of Account Edge for Mac and set that up instead of the Network version. Doing this way gave me a major speed improvement. Yes, that's right the non network version runs almost twice as fast in multiuser mode than the networked version with a simple shared folder! There is one drawback to this in that MYOB cannot be run on the machine the data file is residing on, but I just hooked up a mac mini as a dedicated server and I am much happier.

This is not to say that MYOB has become a speed demon. It is still slow in multi user mode, but at least it is better then the network version. For comparison I have a 268 MB file with over 10,000 customers and 10,000 products so it is a big file.

I've looked into other solutions, such as quickbooks enterprise, but I fear that I'll spend $3000 on this and it will be just as slow and actually has fewer features (such as no real inventory management). So for the time being MYOB is still the best option.

As far as Leopard goes. I never had any issues on upgrading. We have never had a crash of MYOB in Leopard and we did have problems in 10.4

As you may note by the title of this thread, I am using the multi-user program on a dedicated server, not the network application. If MU is fast compared to network then things are even sadder than I imagined. I'm working with MYOB to get my money back for the added user. It is utterly useless. I've tried it twice and couldn't believe they actually market a program like this. And we're a small company! Thirty seconds to post a check??! I'd have to pay my bookkeeper $1.00 and hour to make her time affordable!

Dennjon, running the multi-user program on a dedicated server won't necessarily do you any good, because MYOB is not a client/server app. You won't realize any performance benefit to dedicating a machine as a "server." The problem with MYOB is that every client must "talk" to every other client as part of the process of making any change whatsoever to the data file. It's a shared-file system, not a client-server system, so it is inherently inefficient in terms of network traffic and performance, and the performance of the entire system is limited by the slowest workstation. We run 4-6 users, all on GigE, with a dedicated Xserve running FileConnect, and there's simply no way to adequately describe MYOB's performance without using the word "sucks."

I have a feeling that if every workstation were a Mac Pro, with both GigE interfaces configured as an aggregated link--so every station would have a 2Gb ethernet pipe, which by the way requires significantly higher-cost network equipment and expertise--then you might be able to get barely acceptable performance out of a "standard" multi-user setup. Might.

Someone already mentioned http://myob-users.org/ and I wrote the wiki on the all-Mac solution. It does work. I have been using the configuration for some time myself, but we still have other standard networked users on the system, so I can't give you any definite advice on the performance of an "all-local" setup. At some point, we plan to test the performance with at least 4 users using the VNC setup described in the wiki, and see if that helps things. If it does, we may move to that configuration on a permanent basis.

I found that that on UNIX Macs you go to terminal and type TOP.

Watch the list at the very top with Account edge NE running

Processes: 73 total, 2 running, 71 sleeping... 256 threads 13:23:36
Load Avg: 0.32, 0.29, 0.21 CPU usage: 4.2% user, 8.9% sys, 86.9% idle
SharedLibs: num = 183, resident = 50.5M code, 6.68M data, 20.7M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 14186, resident = 421M + 28.5M private, 165M shared
PhysMem: 244M wired, 266M active, 911M inactive, 1.39G used, 624M free
VM: 12.3G + 130M 49098(0) pageins, 0(0) pageouts

With Account edge NE off

Processes: 72 total, 2 running, 70 sleeping... 248 threads 13:16:05
Load Avg: 0.19, 0.20, 0.17 CPU usage: 4.3% user, 9.8% sys, 85.9% idle
SharedLibs: num = 183, resident = 50.5M code, 6.68M data, 20.7M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 13779, resident = 411M + 27.3M private, 154M shared
PhysMem: 246M wired, 260M active, 900M inactive, 1.37G used, 640M free
VM: 11.9G + 130M 49088(0) pageins, 0(0) pageouts

We use 41 megs for NE but when the MacMini's we use had only 512Meg we used 40 Megs more in VM and in resident. As soon as we had free memory above the needed amount the serving of files took way off.

This is account Edge NE 2008 now with 2 gigs in my computer and across the internet the other users checking inventory and selling services are dealing with internet latency not my computer.

384 AccountEdg 1.8% 0:02.09 9 110 380 10.0M 30.5M Reserved 41.1M VM401M

On unix Macs launch AE 2008 Ne and when you click open get your port IP number on mine it is 49159.

Now go to System Preferences/Sharing click Firewall New... Select other at the top
Port number gets your port number entered
Description on mine gets Account Edge put in it.

With that turned on in all the Macs there will be less latency.

That's assuming that the Mac firewall is enabled. If it's not (which is the default), then adding the MYOB port won't make any difference. Most people really don't need to run the Mac firewall--it's not critical to system security as is the Windows firewall.

My minis were factory enabled so we left them that way.

Have you downloaded and tried the July uipdate for AENE?
http://myob-us.com/accountedge/aene/fast/
12.0.9

Anybody download this yet and have a report back?

I'm on 2006 and would have to upgrade to get it. Wondering whether I wait for phase II or get it now. Any feedback would be appreciated.