Lately we have noticed an increasing number of instances where a clinic’s Conquest server will slow down dramatically. The tech’s on site notice their images not arriving from the modalities in an efficient manner. When we look at it, nothing appears wrong, Conquest is still processing requests, but just slowly. To remedy the situation, a quick restart is done on Conquest, which allows for a rapid influx of images from the various modalities.

This had started a while back at our busiest clinic. It was infrequent, so I did not look into it further. It then started happening at another clinic. In this second case, the problem seems linked in some way to a GE Voluson ultrasound unit. This GE device will constantly send “empty” requests to Conquest. When the GE united is powered off, these requests stop, and things speed up again. Because of this other aspect, I ruled out that these two problems were related.

Just recently, two other clinics have had the slowdown happen. That began getting me worried, it seemed like we had a growing problem. Worst of all, at the first two clinics, it was occurring much more frequently, going so far as happening each day for a short period.

As luck would have it, I was downloading a large file one afternoon, and noticed that the reply times to one of our clinics got terrible during this download. Sure enough, I got a call from said clinic that images were slow to arrive from the modalities. This at least narrowed down the problem some. It did not seem like a problem on the clinic side, but more to do with the fact that each clinic auto-forwards all images to a backup server at our central site. It would seem that something was happening because of these backup transfers that was causing adverse effects on Conquest.

Then yesterday, I decided to start turning off these auto forwards, to see if the problem goes away as a result. While doing this work, I noticed that our backup server had numerous stuck tasks revolving around data transfers. That gives me more to look into, and if turning off the forwarding fixes the problem, I will try to narrow it down to a performance issue on the backup server. I still wonder about the network causing some issues as well. We use a wireless provider, and it could be that as the day gets busy, traffic gets affected, and perhaps Conquest is not able to handle the delayed or lost packets.

Nothing is fixed yet, but at least I have some information that will let me work on isolating the issue. Nothing worse then people saying “its broken” but having no idea how to fix it!

Bookmark to: