Issue with Section Access and Loop & Reduce - QlikView

[phreesia_qv2]

Hello All,

I am having an issue related to Section Access and Loop & Reduce on distribution tasks.  I am an OEM partner operating in a Software As A Service environment.  I have about 4000 clients who log into a portal using SSO to access their Qlik reports.  To facilitate this, I have a parent application that has all of my clients in it that I reload.  I then distribute using Loop & Reduce to generate one qvw for each client that they can then access.  This is causing two problems.

The first problem is that if I navigate in QMC to the Documents tab, and then click on 'User Documents', I will crash the server.  I think this is because QMC is trying to get meta data on all 4000 documents and it simply can't do it.  I think this is a bug as simply navigating to a page in QMC should never crash the server.  Of course the workaround is simple; if it hurts when you do that then.....don't do that.  So I simply don't navigate to 'User Documents' and problem solved.

However, the other problem occurs when I run the distribution task.  When I kick it off, and it begins to loop through, reduce and distribute my qvw's, the server CPU and memory build and build until I max them out.  If I cancel the task, the CPU and memory do not return to normal.  I have to go to the distribution folder and delete all of the qvw's, then restart the QlikView Server Service to get it functioning again.

Why do I say this is related to Section Access?  Because if I remove the Section Access from the parent application, everything works fine.  The task loops/reduces/distributes all 4000 qvw's in about 2 hours.  The CPU and RAM do not max out, in fact they don't even get close.

I could provide information about the size of the server, and app, but I don't even think that's relevant because, as I said, when I remove the Section Access from the application, all is well.  So my question for the community is this:  Has anyone else seen this type of issue?  If so, were you able to figure out what was causing it, and ultimately, come up with a solution?

Thanks,

Bret

[phreesia_qv2]

UPDATE

After much troubleshooting and getting Qlik support involved, the exact cause of this issue has been pinpointed, but not resolved.  Here's what we believe is going on.

In our model, we build one large application, and then at distribution time, we loop and reduce to get separate applications for each of our customers.  However, we use Section Access which is added to the large app.  We thought that during the loop and reduce function that the Section Access would be reduced to only include users for the single customer app, but we learned that's not how Section Access works.  What was actually happening was that all of the data EXCEPT Section Access was being reduced to just one customer; each individual app had the Section Access for ALL customers in it.  Section Access does not reduce like everything else.  So, QlikView was trying to keep track of SA for all customers in each application and as we added more and more customers, it was unable to do so. 

QlikView said that the software was 'operating as designed', in other words, they never intended that SA would reduce along with the rest of the data.  And, since we are the only ones currently seeing this 'issue', they are not inclined to do anything about it for the time being.  Please note, I'm not bad-mouthing Qlik, just letting you know what they said, they were actually very helpful in troubleshooting this issue.  So how did we fix it?

We looked at how we could reduce the number of UserIDs that were included in each application and found some efficiencies.  We reduced the number of Users that were being brought into SA and our distribution failures went away.  We realize this is a 'band-aid' fix, and we are looking at adding structure to our user base so that we can perhaps break our large apps into smaller groups prior to distribution which would further reduce the number of Users in the SA.