Performance and Functionality

[cdeatherage]

Hello SugarCRM Users,

I am new to SugarCRM and wanted to make sure I asked some of the users feedback before I start to spend a lot of time/resources using it. I have a company with less than 5000 accounts/5000contacts and will be adding new ones weekly but never see it going over 10,000 accounts/contacts. We use sugar to keep a log of our emails and calls out to the people, but mass emailing and newsletters is going to be a big function as well. I guess some of my questions are:

1.) With 4-5 concurrent users on will it be speed efficient?
2.) Are there ways that I can tweak my settings so that it loads faster?
3.) Any issues with the finctionality of the mass emails?
4.) Are there any modules you can recommend to install that will help with the email functionality.
5.) Are there any other pointers or info you would like to share?

***Also 1 more question was whether I can add new fields to the contact list or not? I added "Last Name" field and found that when I fill in the First name/Last name field, the last name entered groups with the first name field? What if I want to send personalized emails to people, is their a syntax I can type in that will just pull the first name? ***

BTW: I am on a hosted account running CentOS. Dual Opteron 265's, 4 gigs of Ram.


Thanks for all your feedback! I look forward to reading up on this.

Sincerely,

Chad

[mycrmspacegunnar]

Hi

you should have NO problems at all to decently host your small target Sugar install on any PC.


If you want to speed up sugar a bit then I would recommend that you check some of the performance threads
in the forum as for example this one and follow the instructions:
http://www.sugarcrm.com/forums/showthread.php?p=54425

If you install a PHP cache like eaccelerator or APC
and set the expires header for the theme images correctly
then this should feelable speed up Sugar to 100%.

If you run Sugar not locally but access it over the internet then
enabling output compression will again double the speed.


Cheers
Gunnar

[sugarcare]

what does it take to install accelerator?

I thought if you have 2GB of memory, it will be fast.

how do I enable the compression?

[mycrmspacegunnar]

what does it take to install accelerator?

You install the php accelerator on your OS.
The installation prodecure is of course depending on the OS you are using (Windows/Linux/MAC/...)
And you need to "load" and enable the module in your php-configfile. php.ini

For detailed installation procedures please look in the INSTALL howtos of the accelerator of your choice.

Home page of a good accelerator:
http://eaccelerator.net/

I thought if you have 2GB of memory, it will be fast.

Yes, the memory is not the lkimiting factor here.
The target user/database size schould run fine with much less memory.

how do I enable the compression?

There are generally to ways to enable compression.
a) Compression enabled by the webserver. If you use apache then install mod_deflate and folloe/use the settings explained in the other optimization threads.

b) enabling compression on PHP level.
You can do this either globally for all PHP pages by enabling this in PHP.ini.
Search your PHP.ini for the value "output_handle" and set it to:
output_handler = ob_gzhandler ;

c) you can enable it in the PHP source code.
For example if you add this line
ob_start("ob_gzhandler");
right into the index.php file of sugar after the line with <?
then all sugar pages will be compressed and speed up a lot by this


Please enable the compression only once.
If you compress multible times the browser will not be able to display the pages anymore.


For an more advance way to enable compression please search in bugs.suagrcrm.com for etagging.
There is a feature request includiing a small function that will enable this.
Unfortunately I can not give you the bug number as bugs.sugarcrm is down right now.

Cheers
Gunnar