Optimization for busy POS environments

If you use the POS functionality and have some items that are sold very frequently like ice or day passes, there can be a significant a bottleneck in the program after awhile -- especially noticeable in the form of network delays.

This is a result of a field in the inventory items data which  keeps a list of all transactions done for each item.  This list can of course get very large, with thousands of links in it, and this entire list has to be updated and synchronized each time the item is sold.  The temporary solution has been to use Purge Old Data to minimize the size of the field, which can help quite a bit but is not ideal.

In version 4.2.2, we made it possible to eliminate this field so there is no impact on speed when doing sales.  All you have to do is go into Maintenance / Data Field Definitions / Inventory Item Fields, and change the status of the "Inv_Link_List_Trans" field to "Disabled".

HOWEVER, you should be aware of these side effects:

1. This is not reversible -- although the field can be re-enabled, all previous data in it will be lost (causing the reports mentioned below to be inconsistent).

2. This will cause the Old Stock report to be extremely slow -- it may take several minutes to bring it up (and if you try to sort by Date Last Sold, it may take hours).

3. Other POS reports that allow filtering inventory items will also be very slow if the Inventory Filtering includes a filter by date sold or number of days since last sold.

If these report issues are not a concern, then we recommend disabling that field as mentioned to minimize network delays.  In future versions we will use dynamic indexing of the transactions so that the reports won't be slow, and at that time the field will be completely removed anyway.