Hi everyone,
We're running GP2013R2 since last November 2015 on Windows 2012 Servers (6.2.9200). The main GP server only holds the databases (SQL 2012 11.0.5058). I also have a Windows Terminal Server RDS that runs on Win2012 too, as well as GP test servers (both 2012 systems) that run respectively a clone of my prod 2013R2 and a Test bed for 2015R2.
All the servers have plenty of RAM & CPU, and all the systems are VM's hosted on VMWare ESX 5.5.0. I still do have also my two older GP2010R2 servers (1 Test & 1 Prod) that are waiting to be decommissioned, but still run some older web apps on it. My old GP servers are Windows 2008R2 systems and I never had any performance issues with them.
Recently I started to get complains from users that GP is very slow in the morning when the login the first time.. Couldn't really a faulty apps or culprit, since most of the users are running GP 2013R2 off the TS/RDS server, Today it was particularly acute and myself experienced over 5 minutes login time to get into GP.. whereas if I ran my local GP client, I was able to start working within less then a minute..
I checked my process monitor on the GP 2013R2 server, but there was nothing noticeable.. Nor was there any special resource hogger on the RDS server. That led me to some testing I decided to run on all my GP servers, prod & test, since I had myself realized a few times in the recent past that my GP client startup was taking unusually long on the server itself.
Now I hope you're sitting well ? I've timed the initial launch of my GP2013R2 client at 15min 32 secs on my Test bed server (which means no one is connected nor is the SQL server in any ways solicited). For the GP2015R2 client, it was 11 min and 47 secs.. I ran the same test on my production system and it took almost 13 minutes to start the GP client from there... Houston we have a problem !!!
Hold you breath : after closing all of those GP clients, the 2nd & 3rd launch attempt all finished within under one minute (the fastest was ready in 34 secs, and we have a total of 28 modules loaded in the DYNAMICS.SET file.. This is the kind of startup time that I expect from a GP client (less then a minute) and able to achieve constantly on my local client (more or less, depending on the current network load). On the server there is no network latency, so this should be as fast as it could, but clearly there is a problem.
Now my suspicion turns towards some Windows patches & updates that have massively been pushed down to the server in February by our IT Department.. I recall very clearly that when those system were setup last year, I never had such problems..
This is were I'm asking the community if someone else has come across a similar story where the GP client takes extremely long to start the first time in the day.. I need to do more testing with my systems, and I'm even going to ask IT to setup a new Windows 2012 VM from scratch an replay the scenario by starting with the initial upgrade of GP and then monitor the system after patches get applied from Windows Update, with the option of rolling back the snapshots. I have the feeling that since GP relies on .NET 4.x and C++ libraries, that some of them got updated and are now causing an issue.
Thanks in advance for all your comments and hints.