Crystal Report ReportViewer Print Dialog Slowness

[Former Member]

Hi there,

This issue is regarding Crystal Reports integrated for Visual Studio (2013).

The issue I'm currently facing is that once the report has been loaded and the user clicks on the Print button to open the Print Dialog, for one particular report it would take a substantial amount of time (at least 40 seconds) to print ~30 pages which is ridiculous considering we need the system to be responsive.

This issue happened around April 10 of this year and I managed to patch the Print dialog loading speed by removing and re-adding all the dll references to the project but now the issue came back as the user reported to me recently. I could not find any topic on the web for dealing with this issue and how it occurs.

[former_member11696 · Accepted solution]

Since it used to work look into your environment and what changed since.

Possibly some MS KB caused the issue.

[former_member11696]

Hi Cyril,

Does that report happen to have 10 subreports in it? Or may 10 tables or somewhere around that?

When printing it runs the report, that delay could be the report is accessing subreport data.

If you can send it to me I'll run it through my report checker an see if it finds anything?

You can not attach anything to forums now so you'll need an FTP server to send it to me.

Don

[Former Member]

Hi Don:

The report has 3 subreports which is much less than some reports we have which require at least 5 subreports. The main report uses a stored procedure which utilizes 6 tables; a small subreport uses 3; and the main subreport uses a stored procedure for a total of 7 tables with more calculations afterward. As I mentioned, there are reports with the same or more complex structure which can still pull off the print dialog immediately. If you need me to send you a copy of my report, please let me know which method works for you beside from setting up an FTP server from my side due to security concerns.

[former_member11696]

What does Process monitor show? Look for the delay in the time stamps

[Former Member]

From what I see here, when I click on Print, it starts pumping the network I/O about 10 times until the Print Dialog opens while the CPU and everything else intact as shown in the screenshot attached.

So my question is, what is actually happening when the Print button is clicked? And what can I do to make it fast again. This report requires a complex sql command (and I do have quite a few reports with the similar situation but printing was never an issue) and also a lot of calculations (I will rule out the calculation factor in here since the CPU usage during the Print Dialog opening event has never took more than 1% in total). The mystery in here is that the report suddenly became slow when we didn't change the design at all back in April. We also tried to remove the Printer Driver but it is the same overall.

[Former Member]

Hi Don:

I have tried your approach however the AV is out of the picture since all other reports in the program using the same format are working just fine and only take seconds to open Print Dialog. There were no sudden jump in the process RAM and CPU usage while loading the Print Dialog. One thing I notice is that when I suppressed the main subreport, the Print Dialog pop up much faster, almost instantly.

From my understanding working with Crystal Reports until now, the hefty calculation either in the Main Report or in Subreport should only affect the report loading time, once everything is fully loaded, there shouldn't be any reason to have another "load" time (in this case, take 3 times longer than the actual load of the report) when opening up Print Dialog to print the results.

Regards,

Cyril

[former_member11696]

Hi Cyril,

I've never heard of this before. Try using ProcesssMonitor and follow the steps as you try to print.

It could be a corrupted Printer Driver, or possibly your (Their ) AV software is blocking access to the printer. If it worked once it's likely environment changes you need to look into.

Could be a User\Temp folder is full, try deleting all files in that location, 5 or 6 will be locked so skip those, and try again...

Don