10 Steps in Cradle Performance Tuning

Improving Cradle Performance

Everyone likes tools to run quickly. Below is a list of notes, actions and checks to ensure that your Cradle system will run as quickly as possible:

1. Check the time between clients and the server. In the ‘Help’ tab, select ‘About WorkBench’ and ‘Resources’. Look for the ‘average roundtrip time’ line. If the CDS is in your local network, it should be <2 msec. If you connect over a VPN, it should be <25 msec. If longer, you may have a problem.

Screenshot showing the refresh items option in user prefs
Preferences Dialog

2. Consider turning off user preference ‘Refresh items when modifying links’. In the ‘Home’ tab, click ‘Preferences’, then ‘UI Control’

3. Consider turning off ‘indicate linked items in trees’ in the same group of preferences

4. Consider enabling caching of top-level items in Project sidebar, reduces time to find top-level items, in UI Control -> Sidebar preferences

Sidebar preferences in WorkBench
Sidebar preferences

5. Note that when links are created, modified or deleted, the change histories are updated for items at both ends of the link

6. Changes to links to/from items could raise alerts to be sent as and possibly sent to large numbers of users

7. Run the cross reference and item integrity checks in the ‘Project’ tab to find and fix any problems. Issues can arise from unvalidated imports of data or links.

8. Ensure that message compression and server-side processing are both active. Look in ‘CDS Settings’ in the preferences for any user. Checkboxes may be greyed out (can only be set on the server), but its set/not set value is accurate.

9. Large numbers of unread alerts will slow Cradle down at login and logout. Check options in the ‘Alerts’ section of the schema, from ‘Project Setup’ in the ‘Project’ tab. Use ‘Delete alerts’ in this tab to remove current user’s alerts.

Alerts options in Project Setup
Delete alerts

10. Read the performance section in the System Administration manual

We hope that this is helpful!

cradle performance tuning
cradle performance tuning
Article updated 04/02/2019 – Added images

Set Display Time Zone

Storing Dates and Times

Cradle stores all dates and times in UTC, which is most likely not your local time zone.

To ensure that Cradle displays all dates and times using your local time zone, you need to set the ‘Display time zone’ option in Preferences, as shown below. The offset from UTC option is for customers who have users in multiple time zones with a central server. It can be more convenient for everyone to have the same view of times, that of the central server, rather than their local time zone.

We hope that this is helpful!
Cradle Preferences UI Control

Project Schema Report Options

New Cradle 7.2 Reports Feature

It just grew and grew and grew…..

As more functionality is constantly being added to Cradle, the number of elements in the project schema grow. If you want to study only part of the schema, the report could be quite long and unwieldy. Cradle 7.2 allows users to select the portions of the schema they want to show in a report.

Shows selection of part of the project schema and resultant report
Report parts of the project schema

New Cradle 7.3.1 Reports Feature

We’ve made coloursets report more clearly in the Schema Report.

option dialog and result for schema coloursets
Coloursets – Report

Coloursets are a means to easily and consistently apply foreground and background colours to diagram symbols, or item type definitions. you can see more information in the Cradle help.

Copying a Schema

Once you have set up a schema, you can always copy it to a new project.