Service · IT infrastructure

Performance tuning

Picture a Valencia gestoría, a tax and payroll practice with fourteen staff. At the height of income tax season, opening a client record in a3ERP takes ten seconds, the file server freezes mid-morning and somebody suggests a new €6,000 server. Before anyone signs that order, it pays to know what is really happening. Sometimes the database has hit the SQL Server Express ceiling, sometimes antivirus is rescanning every server file each time it is opened, and sometimes a network cable is stuck at 100 Mb. We gather real figures, locate the bottleneck and put it right remotely.

Real data
from your busiest hours
Free fixes
always come first
Before and after
timed in seconds
Nothing to sell
no hardware, no licences

What falls within the scope of this service

Slowness almost never has a single cause. We go through the layers in order, from the one people grumble about most to the one nobody sees.

Pin down the details with one of our engineers

Sign-in and profiles

Three-minute Windows logons caused by piled-up group policies, bloated user profiles and network drives mapped to servers that were retired years ago.

File server and NAS

Folders holding hundreds of thousands of files, real-time antivirus checking every access, inherited permissions that force a check on each file, and disks sitting at 95 %.

ERP database

SQL Server Express close to its 10 GB cap, fragmented indexes, maintenance plans that were never set up, and closing routines launched during office hours.

Microsoft 365 on the desktop

Outlook OST files of 40 GB, Teams with a corrupted cache, OneDrive syncing another department's entire library, and Office add-ins nobody remembers installing.

Connection and wifi

Fibre swamped at midday by cloud backups, access points sharing a channel with the neighbours, and the ISP's consumer router struggling with thirty users.

Online shop

Core Web Vitals in the red, 4 MB images, PrestaShop modules firing dozens of queries per page and ERP stock syncs that lock the database.

How the engagement unfolds, one stage at a time

Diagnosis normally runs one to two weeks. Fixes then roll out in phases, the high-impact, low-risk ones first.

01

Symptoms and baseline

We collect the specific complaints and time the key operations: opening a client, running a report, loading a product page.

02

Monitoring

An agent logs CPU, memory, disk and network over several working days, including at least one genuine rush hour.

03

Plan ranked by impact

Each proposed change comes with its expected effect, risk and cost. You decide what goes ahead and when.

04

Tuning and follow-up

Changes are applied remotely, measurements are repeated, and we keep watch for thirty days to make sure the gain holds.

SQL Server Express costs nothing, but it has a ceiling. Many SME ERP packages ship with the Express edition, which caps each database at 10 GB and only uses part of the server's memory and cores. Once the database grows, the software slows down even while the server is nearly idle. Extra hardware changes nothing; the real options are the right SQL licence or archiving old financial years.

Common questions

Yes, that is the norm. With dated measurements, talking to a3, Sage or Odoo support becomes far more productive: we show them which query is slow, when and under what load. Changes inside the software stay with the vendor, while Apply handles the server, database and network.

Yes. We measure Core Web Vitals, review caching, images, modules and queries, and propose specific changes. If the shop sits on shared hosting that has reached its limit, we will show you the evidence and help you choose an alternative.

We never promise numbers before measuring; that would be selling smoke. What we do guarantee is that each change is measured before and after, and that we will not advise spending money while free tweaks remain.

€75 per hour + VAT, with an hours estimate before we start. On the Start, Business and Premium plans it is part of the service.

You get a specification listing what you actually need, without overprovisioning, and you buy it wherever you like. Apply does not sell hardware. Your local technician or the supplier racks the machine, and we handle configuration and migration from a distance.

Tell us what is slowing you down

Describe one task that frustrates your team and how long it takes. Within one working day we will tell you where we would start measuring.

Hours
Monday to Friday, 9:00-18:00 Spanish time (CET), answers within a working day
Meetings
Video calls via Google Meet or Teams

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