Rarely have I come across a product that generates so much hate and pain
within the software development community as
Crystal Reports (CR) does. For some
reason CR, a.k.a the product programmers have to work with when they go to hell,
is used by many organisations including my own. I knew it sucked and yet I made
the decision to start using it as we could not find anything else on the market
that could do something as simple as generate a score card for a golf
game.
Didus ineptus - Work this one out for yourself
Anyway, this post is not about how much CR sucks, it is about a particular
extremely sucking problem that I, together with other team members, have found a
workaround for that I hope will benefit others when they Google
for the same symptoms.
The problem is as follows; For one of our products we use CR to print a score
card from an ASP.NET page. Server side printing is a nightmare by itself, but we
have managed to resolve that.
However, after we reinstalled a server we found out that suddenly printing
took between 40 and 60 seconds extra. As we are dealing with waiting customers
this is not something that is acceptable. What puzzled us was that when we
disconnected the network on the 2nd LAN port everything worked again at the
speed we were used to.
To cut a very long story - involving a lot of rocket science, trial &
error and Filemon - short,
we found out that using fixed IP addresses rather than DHCP assigned ones on
both network adapters fixed the problem.
Confused? .... I know I am.
Links of interest: