Troubleshooting

The Nitrosphere team is available to assist. Visit Support.

If you are not seeing compression statistics in the NitroAccelerator Console, please ensure the following:

• NitroAccelerator is running as administrator.

• The desired connection ports in use are whitelisted within your firewall settings.

• That all connected systems are using the same version of NitroAccelerator.

• All client applications that send traffic to SQL Server have been re-launched.

• Correlated services and agents have been restarted.

Please note that any time NitroAccelerator has been started or stopped (via the NitroAccelerator Control Console or by starting/stopping the NitroAccelerator Watch service), your client applications, agents, or relevant services must be reset to establish new connections.

TCP-based protocols are required in order to benefit from NitroAccelerator. If your system default is another protocol, you can create an alias that uses TCP/IP, and connect to the SQL Server using this alias.

We are seeing <10% compression?

Your default compression ratio should be 37-96%. A quick tuning call with our team will increase impact.

If the compression rate is 5-10%, the data is being compressed before reaching NitroAccelerator.

If the compression rate is 1-2% or negative, the data is being unexpectedly encrypted before reaching NitroAccelerator.

If you are unable to deactivate your application's compression or non-standard encryption, please reach out to Nitrosphere support to discuss.

If I have NitroAccelerator installed on a client or server, will I still be able to connect to a client/server that does not have NitroAccelerator installed?

Yes. NitroAccelerator does not affect any connections with non-NitroAccelerator clients or servers. However, you will only get the acceleration benefits on connections that have NitroAccelerator installed on both ends.

What is the CPU overhead when using NitroAccelerator?

This will depend on the compressibility of your data, but we typically see overhead in the range of 1-3%.

Will NitroAccelerator run on a virtual server?

Yes, NitroAccelerator can be run on virtual machines.

Does NitroAccelerator work with protocol encryption enabled within SQL Server?

NitroAccelerator does not work with SQL Server protocol encryption enabled. Encrypted data does not compress well, so NitroAccelerator will just bypass and not compress any encrypted packets it encounters. Because of this you will not see any benefit with NitroAccelerator until the protocol encryption is turned off. However, NitroAccelerator includes optional one-click protocol encryption, which is done after the data is already compressed. This maintains the performance benefit while securing the connection.

Is encryption required?

Encryption is required if your connection is going over the internet. Otherwise, it is optional. NitroAccelerator includes encryption tuning settings within the console and all caching operates within existing ports and local kernels. Visit Security Overview for more info.

Is NitroAccelerator cluster aware?

Yes. To run NitroAccelerator on a cluster, simply install the product on each node. On fail-over, your clients will continue to benefit from a compressed connection.

Why does the Diagnostics dialog show a warning for my clients using MARS?

Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS) is a separate protocol on top of the Tabular Data Stream that is extremely chatty and tends to perform very poorly over slow networks. To maximize performance, we recommend that our customers not use MARS, but instead use a different connection for each query. NitroAccelerator will provide a much greater performance benefit on connections that do not have MARS enabled.