Testing connectivity on 100bT LAN

Template set has 325 CCS, 389 Loan Programs, and 501 Custom Docs.

The first time you try to pull up CCS, LP's, or Custom Docs, after your initial connection to the PDS server, the point client hangs.  On average, 120 seconds for CCS, LP, or Custom Docs.  After this initial "read", all subsequent reads are more like real-time. 

If you close Point, or logoff PDS and re-connect, then you have the same 120+ second delay for the initial "read" of CCS/LP/Custom Docs.

This is on 100bT LAN, I don't even want to imagine how bad this would be over the internet.

Is this normal behavior?  Is there a way around this?  Perhaps force the client to use it's cached template copy all the time?  This delay is VERY annoying and prohibitive to the ideas behind using PDS.

On first login, the whole template set is downloaded from PDS to the Point client (all files, compressed).  After that, only files that have changed are downloaded on subsequent logins.

See this article for more information:

  Q11661 - INFO: (v6.0) Chapter 15 - Template Set
  http://pdskb.calyxsoftware.com/article.aspx?id=11661

which includes these screenshots:

But, I don't think this is the initial template set download.  That happened the first time I ever connected with PDS, before Point even opened.  I have not modified the template set since then.

This slow read time is happening inside of Point, after the client fully opens. We can go to Templates in the left NAV pain and choose CCS/LP/Custom Docs and it hangs.

Likewise, if we close/re-open Point, and go into a file and click the Loan Program field, it hangs for the same amount of time. 

1) Original Word 2003 document (.DOC): 769 KB
2) Opened in Word 2007 and saved as a Word 2003 document (.DOC): 721 KB
3) Opened in Word 2007 and saved as a Word 2007 document (.DOCX): 475 KB

So there's a bit of a gain saving a Word 2003 document using Word 2007.  But the real gain is if you start using the .DOCX Word 2007 format.

I can't help you with the issue with the Point client.  Hopefully someone from the Point team can point you in the right direction; otherwise you may try calling support.

Local install of Point 6.0 client

user=c:\winpoint\user

There is no winpoint=.  Do you mean application=C:\WINPOINT

For kicks, I deleted the entire conects of c:\winpoint\user and c:\winpoint\work

Then, I opened Point and as it should, it pulled the archived template set and extracted it to c:\winpoint\user\PDSFolder\<Servername>-<version#>\.  From the time it said "Requested archived template set" to the time Point opened, it was 26 seconds.  This I would expect, because it has to transfer a 20meg zip, and extract it.

I went to "Templates [PDS]" section in left NAV pain and chose Closing Cost Scenarios, timed it, and it took 29 seconds to load
I went to "Templates [PDS]" section in left NAV pain and chose Loan Programs, timed it, and it took 31 seconds to load
I went to "Templates [PDS]" section in left NAV pain and chose Custom Forms, timed it, and it took 43 seconds to load

I could then go back to CCS/LP/Custom Forms and they would load in real time (1-2 seconds). 

I then closed Point, and re-opened.  I repeated the same process as above, and the same lengths of time resulted, this is as I previously described.

So it's not 60-120 seconds, but 30-45 seconds is still not going to be acceptable for my users on LAN, and I figure those numbers may need to be 50-100% more for users connecting over the internet, even worse.  Something seems fundamentally wrong here.  This goes against the PDS design. 

If I open Point with NO network connectivity (thus cannot reach PDS server), doing the above steps results in 1-2 second read times ALWAYS, there is no 29-43 second initial delay.

I believe this issue is not with the size of the templates, but with the number of files.  PDS will only push out changes to templates, correct?  So if a single loan program, or CCS changes, it only pushes down the new one?  How is his logic setup between Point 6.0 Client and PDS 6.0? 

I believe that after logging into PDS, the first time you reference a particular section of templates, the Point client is comparing it's local cache against the server, and since there are over 300 files in some of those folders, it's taking a really long time to do this.

Is this accurate at all?

It might be intereting to see how this behaves with a diffrent template set that has only one file.

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