Introduction:

The purpose of this post is to explore the technical differences between Amazing Charts V6.6.7 and Amazing Charts V8.2.2. This post will not cover differences in usability or new features. We will be analyzing performance differences and new processes and services added with the new version.

Methodology:

We setup two Virtual Machines both using identical copies of a custom Windows 8.1 Pro x64 Install Disc on one of our Solo+ Servers. Virtual machines were setup on a Workstation with the following specifications Intel Xeon E3 Processor, 32GB DDR3 RAM, and dedicated 256GB Drive for the Virtual Hard Disks. Each Virtual machine was assigned 6 Processing Cores and 5GB of RAM with 40GB of solid state storage. They have identical software except the first Virtual Machine with Amazing Charts V6.6.7 (hereafter referred to as VM-A) and the other virtual machine has Amazing Charts V8.2.2 (hereafter referred to as VM-B).

Process and Services:

The initial differences appear minimal. Amazing Charts V8 appears to be using an extra 200MB of RAM and running two additional processes. Upon further examination, Amazing Charts Version 8 adds a new background process AmazingCharts.Service.AuthService and starts a new Windows service (IPsec Policy Agent). According to Microsoft, Internet Protocol security (IPsec) supports network-level peer authentication, data origin authentication, data integrity, data confidentiality (encryption), and replay protection.  It should also be noted that the AmazingCharts.Service.WinService uses roughly three time as much memory (62.9 MB vs 18.0 MB) and the AdminService uses five times as much memory (53.0 MB vs 9.5MB).(Not shown) The aforementioned AmazingCharts.Service.AuthService also uses around 50 MB. CPU usage is the same at idle conditions. With the 5GB limit set, both Virtual Machines are not using even half of the memory capacity. I haven't investigated why the IPSec service was introduced, but I suspect it is to securely transmit (encrypt) data on and off the network in conjunction with the Auth Service.

Performance:

To test the performance, I kept the Task Manager open alongside Amazing Charts while I completed a patient chart. I performed similar actions on a patient chart in both Virtual machines. The performance appeared to be identical for one user. Refer to the Sample Video above. Memory and CPU Usage appear nearly identical. Speed is also quite similar. If you are suffering significant delays, you may want to also analyze your usage patterns. A good rule of thumb is that if it’s slow on the server, it will be slow for all the clients too. I suspect the majority of users experiencing significant speed delays either have an existing networking issue or hardware that was borderline for AC V667. It should be noted that we use our own customized version of Windows as well as some additional optimizations included with our servers. This was conducted on one of our 2012 Solo+ Server Models. Performance was excellent for 3 year old hardware. More info on those here:
http://ltmedical.net/services/medical-servers/#

If you are experiencing significant slowdowns, this can be most likely traced back to your hardware or netowrk. You can contact me using the information below:

Sandeep Luthra | sandeep@LTMedical.net
LT Medical | (760) 895-1390
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