export sales timing out

I'm trying to export all sales from my site, via the admin sales page. This is timing out, even when I select a smaller time window. running versoin 4.1 that has been upgraded from many earlier version.

XML or Excel?  (have you tried the other?)

Tried both, even tried pdf ;) we found we have to limit it to a very tiny range to get it to work- so something is definitely not optimized with it. Wondering if it's just our old system that has been updated so many times though. In any case though...

You could use the SQL Profiler to see if it's a database problem.

Yeah I'll do that

I'm not very experienced with the profiler so I'm likely doing something wrong, but I wasn't able to figure out anything from it.

I had no luck with this, curious if anyone else has run into it. thanks