Open Dental Forum

Good afternoon,

We have a small dental practice with 4 locations and 100 users. All users currently run from single server. We had a number of issues with performance and availability (OD clients crashing, "Too Many Connections" messages, etc.). We have done some work on the Open Dental server as well as the MySQL server that have dramatically improved the reliability and availability of Open Dental. Most of our issues went away except an intermittent freeze that happens randomly and is not experienced by all users.

I have checked the server logs as well as MySQL when I get complaints but I cannot find anything obvious in the logs and resource utilization is very low (CPU < 15% consistently, memory usage at 4 to 6GB out of 16GB available, NIC utilization 1MBPS or less, Disk I/O's very low). I was curious if anyone has had a problem like this and if it was resolved, how was it done?

I'd also like to know if anyone has tried any performance tuning on the MySQL database. So far, I've increased the MAX_CONNECTIONS value which fixed a lot of our problems but I'm sure there are other values I can tweak. I have been looking at MySQL's website as well as other forums but wanted to see if any other OD user has done tuning and what were the results.

Any help would be appreciated.

What version of Open Dental are you using?
We've been making a lot of speed improvements to v16.2 and v16.3 (which is not released yet) so you might want to start preparing your locations for an upgrade if you're on an older version once v16.2 becomes stable.

jsalmon wrote:What version of Open Dental are you using?
We've been making a lot of speed improvements to v16.2 and v16.3 (which is not released yet) so you might want to start preparing your locations for an upgrade if you're on an older version once v16.2 becomes stable.

We did an upgrade on the weekend to 16.1.3.

Any suggestions anyone?

http://blog.webyog.com/top-10-things-to ... ql-server/

Database servers are always more complex then ya think. Long story short, there are probably some queries that can cause problems and my guess is the developers are aware of it.

Question: Is there a mysql configuration geared torwards multiple locations?

I have a new client that is facing a freezing issue under heavy load. They are running mysql 5.6.. Hmmmmm Don't know rather to downgrade mysql or upgrade.

They have about 35 workstations.

I wouldn't downgrade MySQL. Often MySQL 5.6 is much faster than 5.5.

Yeah yesterday I found some software that extracts data out of Open Dental set to run at 4:30pm and I think that may be causing the problem. Company that wrote it is out of business. So I just disabled that service.. see if that helps. According to its logs it is still running. I got more info that the slow down happens around 7pm. Practice Analysis software from pbsystems.

Yep.. removing PB Systems fixed it.