Is Sage Slow and is it their fault?

Sage 50 has a reputation for not scaling very well and suffering from poor performance on networks.

Until Sage change the backend to MySQL (next year?) they are always going to be hampered by the old flat file structure that it uses. No database technology here. In some respects it's amazing it works as well as it does.

But after spending years working with Sage Line 50, developing our own Sage applications and installing and supporting networks I believe a lot of users would benefit from making sure their systems are correctly configured before pointing fingers.

I see huge differences in Sage performance on very similiar kit. Often Small Business Server 2003 is maligned in this respect but with a proper benchmark on identical correctly configued software there was effectively zero difference between XP and SBS as a Sage Server.

We have recently written a test program that tests some aspects of Sage performance by reading all the Header Transactions and calculating a Rate per second to read a thousand records. With initial tests on just a few systems the result varied from 0.65 of a second to over 7 seconds. Our benchmark was 1.2 seconds on a Pentium 4 notebook configured as an SBS Server.

The program also checks some common configuration issues.

You can check out our test program at www.sbslimited.co.uk/sageslow.htm