Tech Forum

I am fairly new at my calling as STS (Stake Technology Specialist) and one of the common complaints I am hearing from our ward clerks is:

"Why is the system so slow launching MLS?"
"Why is the system so slow booting up (Starting Windows) - after logging in?"

It's funny how fast technology changes... A couple of years ago 256MB RAM seemed like sufficient... But is that still sufficient to run JAVA apps (IE: MLS) today?

In our stake, we have Dell GX270 systems with 1.7GHz Celeron processors. (I think that's what they are??)

Has anyone out there upgraded their RAM - to 512MB+ and seen any better performance in MLS? I would hate to upgrade all the ward computers and not see a marked difference.

Are there any other fixes? Clearing out cache/temp files, etc. I should try first? BTW - We just upgraded to MLS 2.6

Any ideas or thoughts would be appreciated! THANKS!

There have been people on the forums that have mentioned this problem before and the consensus is that 512 MB should be the minimum.

256MB is the "church standard". Some people have done timings and found significant speed improvements in boot up, starting MLS (which frequently happens while boot up is still completing), and one report of faster processing in send/receive.

However, for MLS itself, not much. I've heard the new MLS 2.6 is much faster in printing. It would be interesting to see what more ram does for printing in MLS 2.6.

One tip I will suggest, disable the OpenOffice loader that by default tries to load Open Office into memory on start up. You can cut down on the time it takes for things to settle down after booting.

If you do memory upgrades, start with the Stake machine. Since it contains all the members of the stake, it's the one that pushes the limits. If you've got two wards in the same building, you can do some performance tests with 256MB and then borrow the memory out of the other unit to do it again at 512MB and see what the difference is. Remember, it will feel much different in start up, but you'll need some benchmarks of actual use (printing reports, changing screens, etc.) to know if it's really that helpful.

All computer in our stake have been upgrade to 512k

Was that a church upgrading or the stake using its budget to upgrade the computers?

I started out with the idea of upgrading our Ward box, but when the other clerks heard of my
radical idea, they got excited. I passed the idea over to the Stake tech, and it went from
there. The former Stake tech is a professor of IT technologies at Dixie College, so I figure
he couldn't get blame for much ....

The RAM upgrade was paid from the Stake budget.

Since RAM is so cheap it wasn't that hard to justify

Oh understandable I just was wondering if the church was starting a church-wide upgrade.

Running a Java program isn't the only reason for the computer needing more RAM. The new Desktop 5.5 has a firewall and other things built in that are also taking up computing resources. It's a lot to cram into 256 Megs of RAM. Also, the biggest thing are clerks have complained about is the time to transmit to Salt Lake. It often takes 15 to 20 minutes since most of our buildings are doing this over dial-up.

Jay

jayaskre wrote:Running a Java program isn't the only reason for the computer needing more RAM. The new Desktop 5.5 has a firewall and other things built in that are also taking up computing resources. It's a lot to cram into 256 Megs of RAM. Also, the biggest thing are clerks have complained about is the time to transmit to Salt Lake. It often takes 15 to 20 minutes since most of our buildings are doing this over dial-up.

Jay

In fact at least one ward (we're in the same stake) wants to pay themselves to boost their computer's memory.

JTaber wrote:In fact at least one ward (we're in the same stake) wants to pay themselves to boost their computer's memory.

The Stake has a budget for this and it should go through the stake tech budget as the discretion of your stake president.