Clarity

What are your expectation for load times when opening a project from Clarity to MSP? What are your load/save thresholds for small, medium and large projects/programs? We have defined small as <25 tasks (generally KLO projects), medium >25 and <200, and large >200 or master projects and programs. If you experienced long load/save times, how did you overcome the issues.

Our platform is AIX, Websphere, MSP2007

Should it take minutes to load a project into MSP?

Hello

This is a very good issue, because i deal with it daily :tongue ... The time Clarity-MSP interface takes to open a project is dependent on these factors:

- Number of tasks
- Number of baselines (if you have the option to load all baselines on MSP)
- Number of resources
- Actuals posted on the project.
- Others i don't remember right now. (sorry)

We have projects ranging from 50 tasks to 8000 tasks and CA's recomendations (and mine too) to improve performance are these:

- Don't schedule a project with over 1000 tasks, if you definetly have to, please break the project on smaller mini-projects.
- Don't nest a lot of tasks. 3-4 levels is fine.
- Try to separate the assignments by each resource. Having tasks with multiple resources/actuals tends to slow down the process.
- Don't load all baselines on MSP. The current baseline is enough for most projects.

Regarding your last question i think that a threshold of 5 minutes is "bearable" by most users. However we have cases (with the 5000-8000 tasks projects above) that takes over 30-45 minutes to open. Yes it is a [color=#FF0303]nightmare[color].

Hope it helps, kind regards

Rafa

Hi Guys,

We are experienceing this same issue now. We are on 12.0.3, Windows server 2003, MSProject 2003, Oracle 11 on AIX.

1800-line schedule. Prior to baseline, took 2minutes to load, after baseline, takes around 30minutes to load. During this time 100% desktop CPU usage, and no network traffic (ie, not a server-side issue).

What versions etcetera are you guys on?

PS, it is also a ootb standard mspfield mapping - nothing special there.

We are running 12.0.5 on AIX, Oracle 11 with WebSphere. Desktop is MSP 2007. Our configuration is basically OOB, we have added a couple of fields. Users are definitely not happy with the lengthy downloads.
Assigning single resources to activities will definitely not "cut it" here. No one wants to create a seperate task for every resource assignment even if it were to speed up the download process.
Has anyone tried OWB as a comparison? Is it faster or about the same? Could the lengthy timeframe be based on how the MSP API was used to interface to Clarity?

Hello Pete

OWB is faster than MSP, thats for sure, but you have to be very very careful to migrate to OWB.

OWB have a lot ofdifferences with MSP, Look and feel, loading patterns, auto-schedule, etc. The decision to change your scheduler should be the result of a very detailed process of understanding the tools, pros, cons and of course a lot of tests should be made.

Hope it helps

Rafa.

Pete,
For question about comparing the load times...
We use OWB and have one project that is currently over 9700 lines. This same project consists of 1 master project & 18 sub-projects.
(The project is baselined too.)
The load time for this project from Clarity into OWB is approximately 3 minutes.
The save time back to Clarity is approximately 3 to 5 minutes.

Our environment is:
Clarity 12.1, single server ‘small architecture’ on Tomcat, Win2003 32 bit.
SQL 2005 DB
‘Only Export Current Baselines in Scheduler’ option checked. <-- this greatly affects load time for schedules in the client tools. See the Admin Guide for more information.


Also, if you haven't seen the Greenpaper comparing OWB & MSP...I have attached a copy of this.
It is a good doc on what the differences are with the 2 tools, things to watch for, understand, etc.

Thanks,
Lisa