Operations will soon be upgrading our log server to SSDs (solid state drives), which are much faster than traditional hard disks and should improve our log server performance considerably.



Meanwhile, if someone else is already running their own Transaction Log query with a huge number of results, that can bog down the log server for everyone else until their query returns all of the results they requested. When this happens, it's just a matter of waiting for that query and all the ones waiting in line behind it to wrap up. Whenever you run any custom log queries (besides the default past-30-days list you get upon first opening your log), we recommend choosing your query criteria to be as narrow/specific as possible -- e.g., don't query the log for the maximum possible date range when you know you're really only interested in transactions from a narrower time frame.



Early in the year up to Tax Day, our log server tends to get hammered pretty hard by people running annual reports on their past year's sales for tax/accounting purposes, so it may help to try again later in the evening when demand is off peak. We'd also recommend relying on your payment processor logs (e.g. PayPal History) as your primary source for revenue figures, as all of the data in our Transaction Logs are "secondhand" and only as accurate and complete as what your payment processor(s) report to us -- refunds/reversals in particular can cause a discrepancy, as most of our supported payment services don't report those to us at all, and PayPal's refund/reversal reporting is inconsistent, often resulting in adjusted price figures with oddball remainder amounts for affected transactions at our end.

We too continue to have transaction log hangups and issues.



They started happening for us over the last month or two, (but the prior few years were smooth sailing.) It is becoming a bit of a hindrance for some of our operating procedures and for delivering customer service to our buyers. I just want to stress that it would be helpful to get this issue cleared up as soon as it is possible.



Thanks.

This continues to be an issue, and it hinders our ability to conduct business. We make several hundred sales per month, and managing customer issues is becoming a problem. At this point, we are going to have to start looking for a new cart system, we can't continue to operate like this.

Unfortunately, at present we don't have an estimate for how soon our log server will be upgraded. It may help to schedule your log queries for a lower-traffic time of day, such as the start or end of your workday, or even at night if you're not limited to working daytime office hours.



You might also consider using our custom/third-party Integration feature to have us transmit order details to a custom script at your end which could do whatever you wish with that data, such as preparing a periodic order summary in exactly the format most convenient to you:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.integration.htm

Thanks for the suggestion; we'll keep that in mind, though I'm not sure having a separate "order lookup" query routine would solve the problem, since it would be querying the same database as transaction log queries, and the server upgrades we're planning may make it a moot point anyway.



You might consider using View/Edit Email Lists in your Seller Admin as a quick lookup for who ordered what and when, as those Buyer Group lists are managed in a separate database table. However, that may only be reliable for buyers who paid by PayPal, because PayPal's checkout site provides no opt-out choice for joining email lists, so all PayPal buyers are opted-in to those lists automatically. Buyers who pay by any other checkout method would need to deliberately opt-in during checkout to appear listed there.



You also don't need to wait for the initial Transaction Log view to display results if you really just want to run a custom query to find a particular known buyer or order. As soon as the fields for date, product, buyer name, Transaction ID, etc. appear, you can just cancel that default query by hitting the Esc key or your browser's Stop button -- at which point you should see your browser stop loading the page -- then enter the details you want for your custom query.