Anyone having Lacerte performance problems may want to take a look at this.
Lacerte 2018 and versions going back a few years started performing slower last year. There were small delays that occurred randomly in Lacerte. The desktops, network, server running as a Windows DC was all well designed, well-resourced and extremely fast.
With desktops having 16 GB or RAM, I7’s and SSD drives we decided to get a couple of new desktops. The new system is a 16 core AMD, 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB M2 drive. Strong Nvidia 4K adapter as well. Overkill for sure.
Most interesting is that these new, eyeblink fast, desktops performed atrociously. The latency in Lacerte was so bad it made the system literally unusable regarding Lacerte - only.
The issues seem related to Windows 10, version 1903, which apparently does a different type of real time scanning when files are located on a domain controller (“DC”). Running a virtualized Windows 10 desktop, on the same server and accessing same exact files eliminated the latency when shared from that desktop.
As a test, I disabled real-time protection in Windows Defender. Performance issues completely disappeared. Performance was then - instantaneous.
Issue #1 is confirmed that Lacerte and Defender on Windows 10 version 1903 when accessing data files on a Windows DC is an issue.
Another issue is users having administrative access and accessing mapped drive letters. One way to see if this issue exists on the desktop is to run websetup. If you cannot see the mapped drive letters in all configuration areas of that application your desktop has this problem. Windows and Lacerte does not see mapped drive letters consistently. This too was compounding the problems we were having. This article resolved that issue:
https://accountants-community.intuit.com/articles/1860418-lacerte-setup-cannot-find-network-drive do not be fooled by seeing the mapped drive letter in Windows File Explorer. The registry entry this article speaks to is the solution.
Issue #2 was administrative users not reliably seeing mapped drive letters. Solved.
Another answer to the AV dilemma. Solved.
Many folks do not realize that Windows Defender on W10 version 1903 will automatically reenable itself. Usually the next day. One risky way is to truly disable Windows Defender. Not recommended. We had success with Cylance AV. There is a home edition
https://promos.cylance.com/en-us that currently has a promotion at the time of this writing (11-2019). This product took Windows Defender real time protection out of the scenario and eliminated the real-time protection issue. Other AV’s may also resolve this.
This tormented us for 6 weeks. I hope this helps someone out there. Lacerte refused to replicate what I would believe to be an extremely common server/network scenario which is a Windows DC.
