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mwallman
Creator III
Creator III

Help: Preview and Task Execution taking a long time. Please help me understand performance and resolving this issue?

Hello,

I have NPrinting June 2017 installed and created some PixelPerfect and PowerPoint reports.

1) When I try to Preview my reports from the Reports menu, they do not preview and I get a message saying 'It has taken more than 10 minutes. Hint: Create a scheduled task'

2) So I create a task and execute it but this never completes (always under the status of Running in Task executions page) or it never produces anything in NewsStand.

This is some information about my set-up:

1 NPrinting App with 4 Connections

2) The report I am running only has two charts, both bar charts with no more than 10 dimensions so it is not a big PixelPerfect report

3) The related QlikView apps load metadata fine in NPrinting

4) The folder destinations use a UNC file path and I checked the syntax of the path and made sure it is correct

I am stuck on what to investigate next.

Anyone able to help why is the Preview option not working? And subsequently why is the Task Execution not executing properly?

7 Replies
ogster1974
Partner - Master II
Partner - Master II

I would start with can you generate a report at all.

A simple App one connection with one chart.  Preview and see if it returns in a report.

Next try and simply your app.  I always try to ahve adedicated Qlik App for NPrintitng to reduce size and number of connections.  You say you have 4 connections but 2 charts so sounds like you have potential to simplfy.

When runing the task check out the CPU and Memory usage.  It sounds like you are maxing it out for along period.  NPrinting certainly 17 is not as effecient as 16 yet so something that worked fine on 16 may take alot longer to run or not at all.

I hope this helps wioth your investigation.

Regards

Andy

mwallman
Creator III
Creator III
Author

Hello Andy,

Thank you for the useful information.

This app was my initial test app, I only drew two objects to see if they run. Eventually there will be over 50 charts taken from 4 QlikView apps.

I have a few more questions:

1) When NPrinting opens an app, does it open the app in NPrinting server or the QlikView server the app resides in?

2) Let's say you need all the data, variables etc from the QlikView app, instead of building a dedicated NPrinting QlikView app is it not better to simply create a hidden sheet in the original QlikView app and add objects there? Maybe I thought this saves RAM space because it is only adding on few MBs of RAM rather than an entire app loaded.

Perhaps I misunderstood 2.

Any info would be great.

ogster1974
Partner - Master II
Partner - Master II

NPrinting connects to the app each time it generates a report so the size of the App matters as it has to evaluate the exprression and chart each time its generating a new chart object for the published report condition.  So if you have 10 years of data in your app and your report only needs the current year or last 12 months you are placings a large unnessary overhead on your server as NPrinting is churning through data its not going to use.

This is why it would be better to take your production app and create a seperate NPrinting app that only contains the chart objects required tobe published in NPrinting and only the data both fields and volumes that are needed to create the report.

How big is your app?  and what is your current server setup CPUs and cores?

My apps are pretty light.  Around 2-10MB per app and the server has 8 CPUs and and 32GB RAM this usually means generating out reports (a number of charts, tables and a level or 2) to around 50 users a time takes a few minutes.

Regards

Andy

vvvvvvizard
Partner - Specialist
Partner - Specialist

If your app is too big the preview wont work , rather generate the report each time

mwallman
Creator III
Creator III
Author

Thanks Andy,

My QlikView apps are 300MB, 150MB (2 of them) and 25MB in size. I will check on the hardware spec as I am not sure.

Does NPrinting open the apps in QlikView Server or NPrinting Server when processing and making selections to build the report?

ogster1974
Partner - Master II
Partner - Master II

It processes the report generation in memory on the NPrinting server or whichever server you have your engine hosted on.

The size of your apps indicates to me you'll need alot of resource to generate them out in a timely manner.  Do you use levels?  that can be resource hungry too. Also how are you going to use filters if any in your report at user, report or publishing stage.  They all have an impact.

I would start will a lightweight app around 5MB and start building up your complexity from there you can then benchmark your environment and be able to balance the requirements with what realistically you can produce.

I started with 2 cores and 8GB of RAM and I got nowhere so make sure your server is well resourced.

Regards

Andy

Stephen_Jasionowski

What does it show in the task executions page?

https://YourServer:4993/#/tasks/executions