Things to Consider Before Generating a Report

The most important thing to remember when using Piggybank plugin is … it does a HUGE amount of data manipulation. So please remember, it takes time to generate big reports.

The irony though, is that almost 90% of the time taken to generate your report is spent waiting for the transaction file to download from EPN. Piggybank itself is extremely fast once it has the data at its disposal.

Once the reports are completed, at the very bottom of the screen you can see the time taken to download the data from EPN, versus how long it takes Piggybank to process the results for you.

Example 1 : A date range that results in about 100 completed auctions (and ACRU’s), and 2500 clicks, takes 13 seconds to download the data from EPN, and 2  seconds for Piggybank to process. Using 15.6 MB of server RAM.

Example 2 : A  date range that results in 1500 completed auctions (and ACRU’s), and 40 000 clicks, takes 113 seconds to download the data from EPN, and 17 seconds for Piggybank to process. Using 20.6 MB of server RAM.

Using Piggybank Plugin

Once you have completed the initial configuration in the Piggybank configuration screen (see the Piggybank installation and configuration tutorial), then you will spend most of the time on the Report screen itself.

There is an option at the top of each report screen to set/change the date range of the report. When you change any date and click on the “Save” button, then a new report with those parameters is automatically generated.

To generate a report, just enter in some dates (in the american dd/mm/yy format), and click the “Save” button.

In the same area, there is also an option that you can use to switch on (or off) the displaying of the Sales vs Earnings chart. There is virtually no time penalty whether you have this on or off, the report will still generate in a similar time.