While we were at a customer today installing our Report Explorer product, we were asked to help troubleshoot a problem that they were encountering. Apparently, their nVision reports were timing out in their production reporting run, even though performance didn't seem to be an issue.

Processing Time Limits? What are they?
For those customers not as familiar with some of the new process scheduler features in PeopleTools 8.44, processing time limits is one of the cool new features that made it into that release. This is part of a series of features in process scheduler that makes it much more usable:

• Jobsets: the ability to nest jobs within jobs
• Processing time limits: the ability to set time limits for processes at the processs type and process level.
• Thresholds: the ability to set constraints on a process scheduler server that drive wether it will accept new process requests. Significantly improves load balancing.
• Restart: the ability to restart processes, including nVision reports and clean up after them.

For nVision, you can set process time limits at the process type, process, and even report request level. This allows you to minimize the impact of long-running, bad-performing nVision reports to your production environment.

Makes Sense, so where's the issue?

Good question. In this circumstance, the customer was running a high volume set of nVision reports (generating many thousands of instances). Each instance was generated in 1-3 minutes. The time limit for nVision reports was set to 30 minutes.

The problem came up as an artifact of using scopes to generate instances (which in nVision allows application data to drive the generation of report instances... an example would be to generate a Profit and Loss for each department in the department table). Although one would expect the time limit to be re-set for each instance (because you don't want the processing of any individual report instance to go too long or get hung), it isn't. This means that if it takes 1 minute to generate an instance and the scope generates 31 report instances, your process will time out.

Ah... So, what are my options?

Good question. There are two relatively obvious ones:

• Reduce the "scope" of your scopes, which means scheduling more report requests with smaller scopes.
• Beef up the time limit. In nVision, this can be done at the report request level, which can allow you to override a generalized time limit designed for non-scoped report requests in one that does use a scope.

You can also use the new restart functionality in PeopleTools 8.44. Restart gives you two powerful capabilities:

• The ability to pick up a scoped report request where it left off and not re-run instances that were already generated.
• The ability to automatically try to restart the report a certain number of times.

Therefore, the process scheduler can more gracefully handle a scoped report. It will automatically restart the process after the time limit has expired and pick up where it left off. That means that if you set the restart limit to 5 and the process time limit to 30 minuts, you can get 150 minutes of processing for your scoped reports (although it's better to manage it a little more closely).

Happy Processing!!

Labels: Database, nVision, Performance