How do you handle speed issues from Europe with Access apps

[colezpapa]

We have 2 applications in NY that they use in our London office. The locals in London claim the app is very slow.
What is Citrix all about, I remember one place I worked had an office in LA and they used Citrix to get to the access apps. What do you guys do with offices around the world?

 

[RuralGuy]

Remember that on its best day, the Internet is perhaps 10% of the speed of a LAN. As for Citrix, Google is your friend.

HTH RuralGuy (RG for short) acXP winXP Pro
Please respond to this forum so all may benefit

 

[fneily]

Citrix allows the user to dial directly to a lone computer so you only need a single database. See

http://www.citrix.com

At the old HCFA, now CMS, since they cover all the U.S. plus territories such as Guam and Puerto Rico, they used a citrix server for them to dial into the data bank.

 

[maxhugen]

Technically, a LAN is way faster than the Internet as RuralGuy pointed out. However, some organisations' LANs are so overloaded they're incredibly slow.

Since your London office is accessing a file (mdb) in NY, they're connecting over a WAN (wide area network). At each end will be a LAN (local area network), eg

London LAN <--> WAN <--> NY LAN

Just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, so a connection is only as fast as the slowest link.

As a simple test to see how slow the connection might be, put a large file (say, 10mb) in the same folder as the mdb. It could be an image file, word doc etc. Then ask the Pommies to open it, and see if there's a significant delay.

If indeed it's a problem with a slow connection, and you can't do anything about it, your options may be:

1. Set the London office up with their own local copy of the mdb application FE and data BE.
2. Migrate it to the Internet. Well designed web apps run across the net quite well really. (how long does it take to get 100 records back from a Google search?)
3. Live with it as it is!

Remember, Citrix, thin-client technology... all these still have to cross the same network.

Max Hugen
Australia

 

[RuralGuy]

The advantage of a terminal server like Citrix is that all that passes over the internet is the data necessary to update your screen. All of the processing and the record handling is done back at the server.

HTH RuralGuy (RG for short) acXP winXP Pro
Please respond to this forum so all may benefit

 

[maxhugen]

That's true... yet I've read some user complaints that it's not all it was cracked up to be.

Maybe the prob is that in an app, every time you do some processing (eg run code etc), it has to do a round trip to the server, rather than process it locally? I don't really know.

Max Hugen
Australia

 

[JoeAtWork]

Running a straight Front-End / Back-End Access system over a WAN should never even be considered as an option during design.

If you don't go with the Citrix solution, the other option is creating a web front-end. There are many technologies you could use to implement this: DAPs, ASP, ASP.NET, etc.