Ghost 3.x console is slow and unresponsive - Suggested settings

Products

• Ghost Solution Suite

Issue/Introduction

If you're experiencing an issue where your Ghost Solution Suite (GSS) Console might be slow or becoming unresponsive it might be caused by multiple causes.

Environment

GSS 3.x

Resolution

• If you're using multiply GSS consoles (Remote GSS Console installed) - make sure that on your SQL eXpress database you have following SQL options enabled:

READ Committed Snapshot
Allow Recursive Triggers

If you're using SQL 2014 Express (installed by GSS Installer RU8 and lower), you might require to install additional SQL Management Studio component from Microsoft Site:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-ie/download/details.aspx?id=42299 
Click Download > and select either MgmtStudio 32BIT\SQLManagementStudio_x86_ENU.exe or MgmtStudio 64BIT\SQLManagementStudio_x64_ENU.exe package

• If you're using a lot of Dynamic Computer Groups with Filter like "contain"

In case when you have a lot of custom Dynamic Groups with "contain" filter, for example if we would have a Dynamic Group Filter - If Application Name contains "Notepad" - The SQL query behind it would be:

select computer_id from application where name like '%Notepad%'

And every query with "like" clause - would take much more time than query with exact selection. Following query might take 3 seconds to complete

While if we would use Filter with exact match - If Application Name equals "Notepad++", Which will result in a query:

select computer_id from application where name='Notepad++'

Time to execute this exact match query would take ~150ms (20 times faster).

If we're having 2 or 3 Dynamic Filters - and small amount of computers/data in database - it might be not crucial, but when having 500+ clients - the difference might be huge.

Thus it's Highly recommended to Avoid using Filter with "contain", "starts with", "ends with", and if possible to use "is exactly" filter operation when possible.

Due to not perfect DB design for large-scale amount of data, Symantec Development is looking into improving it in future Major Release. If you'd liked to be notified of when this issue has been fixed, please subscribe to this article and you'll receive an email when it has been fixed.

• Additionally, we've seen vast improvement of DB after running following SQL stored procedure -

exec sp_updatestats

More info: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173804.aspx
NB! - Take a complete backup of the SQL Database before running it and also note that it would take some time as it's updating system database for statistics/indexes. And it's not recommended to have it executed often (once a month during default SQL maintenance plan would be perfect).