It is incredibly frustrating when you are working at the front desk trying to check out a patient when Eaglesoft stops responding for 10 or 20 seconds at a time.  Or when you are in a patient room trying to pull up an Xray and it takes forever!  We have seen this time and time again.

Thankfully, we have 5 tips that you can follow to improve Eaglesoft’s performance. Feel free to follow along and perform each recommendation on your own.  If you do not feel comfortable doing these steps, or you don’t want to go through the hassle, please feel free to reach out to us.  We, at Victory Technology, are here to assist you.  We are local and available to Dental Practices in the Knoxville, TN area.

The 5 Tips:

1. Computers and Server should meet these minimum requirements.

• The server and computers should be no more than 5 years old.

• • This is because computers and servers that are older than 5 years are much more likely to break down and struggle to keep up with today’s computing demands.

• Computers and servers should be using solid state drives (SSD) not hard disk drives (HDD).

• • SSDs have a huge performance benefit over HDDs.  This is because they have much faster random read/write speeds than HDDs.  This speed difference is very noticeable when working with Eaglesoft’s database as Eaglesoft is having to jump around (random read/write) throughout it’s database to fetch the data that you are requesting from it.

• Server should have at least 16GB of RAM and computers should have at least 8GB of RAM.

• • If your server has less than 16GB of RAM or your computers have less than 8GB of RAM, there is a good chance that they are having to compensate for that deficiency by using what is called “Page File”. This happens when the hard drive has to pick up the slack for not having enough RAM.  This is an issue because RAM is MUCH FASTER than any hard drive (HDD or SSD).

• Computers and server should have 1Gbps Network Interface Card (NIC).

• • If your computers or server have less than a 1Gbps NIC, you will be operating at 1/10th the speed of what you otherwise would be capable of doing with a 1Gbps NIC.  This is because network cards usually come in two common flavors 100Mbps and 1Gbps.  The 1Gbps card is 10x faster than the 100Mbps card.  There are network cards as fast as 10Gbps, but those are still pretty uncommon to have at every layer of your network (and unnecessary for this use case).

2. Router, switches and wireless access points need to be capable of 1Gbps speeds.

If your router, switches or access points are not capable of 1Gbps speeds, you are going to experience a noticeable bottleneck when trying to use Eaglesoft.  Surprisingly we still see many 100Mbps switches out in the field.

Keep in mind that if you try to run Eaglesoft over Wi-Fi, it will most certainly be slower than having a hard line connection.  This is because the hardline connection can do 1Gbps, whereas Wi-Fi can only hit (real world) around 150Mbps.  This is unless both your wireless access points and the Wi-Fi card in your computer are Wi-Fi 6.  They can achieve speeds closer to what you would get over a hardline connection (these are slowly becoming more common).

3. Wiring infrastructure is at least CAT 5e.

Even if every device on your network has a 1Gbps NIC, if you don’t have at least CAT5e grade ethernet cable infrastructure, your devices will only be able to run at 100Mbps (1/10th the speed).  To test this, you can look at the cabling jacket to see if it says “CAT5e” on the side.  It might be challenging to visually check the cable infrastructure in your walls.

An easier method of checking this would be within the Windows operating system itself.  Here is a short video on how to perform the the network speed check:

4. Restart Paterson Eaglesoft Service daily and server weekly.

One of the most effective ways to make Eaglesoft run faster is to restart the PattersonServerStatus.exe daily and restart the server and computers weekly.

There is something called the PattersonPM.log file located within the Data folder of Eaglesoft on the server.  This .log file will continue to grow if you do not restart the PattersonServerStatus.exe on a regular basis.  And if it grows larger than 10MB in size, you will start to notice a significant decrease in performance.  We have seen this file as large as 70MB!

To automatically restart this service daily, you can use “Windows Task Scheduler”.  Here are some detailed instructions from Patterson on how to do it.

5. Eaglesoft version is up-to-date and database is optimized.

Lastly, you want to make sure Eaglesoft itself is up-to-date with the latest stable version.  The reason being is because bugs are found in the older versions of Eaglesoft, and they tend to fix those bugs in later releases.

You may also want to call Eaglesoft and have them run their debug tool on your server.   This debug tool checks various things within Eaglesoft which are known to negatively affect performance.  An example of what the debug tool can find is: Custom hours that have no end date.  Surprisingly enough, this one setting is enough to noticeably affect performance within Eaglesoft.

In closing:

If you have done all of these previous steps and you are still having issues, or if the recommendations that we made above seems a little daunting, please feel free to contact us at Support@VictoryTechnology.com or call us at 865-888-9942.  We would be happy to assist.  To see a full list of our tech services, click here.

Additionally, you can find resources from Patterson here.

We can also help with other Dental management programs such as Open Dental, and Dentrix.  As well as imaging programs such as Dexis, Romexis, and Sidexis.

We are also familiar with setting up intraoral cameras, x-ray devices and panoramic machines.  When needed, we will work with the vendors of your Line of Business software and devices on your behalf so that you can focus on what you do best, taking care of your patients.