NPrintingjob is not completed in 24 hours, still running, used to complete in 6-9 hours before

[Digvijay_Singh]

Hi,

We have big report generation task, it used to complete at max in 9 hours, but now after addition of few more cycle values its stuck after showing the message "Starting content production".(Image of task execution message attached) attached.

NPrinting version - 18.29.9.0

Qlik Sense Version - Sept 2018 Patch 2

[Digvijay_Singh]

Just wanted to check if anyone faced similar situations, when Nprinting task is stuck after showing the message 'Starting content production'.  We use Client Name as a cycle field. When I use the Filter and generate reports in chunks, it works fine. 

[Digvijay_Singh]

No related errors or warnings in any of the Nprinting logs. Task shows Running! forever. Logs stopped showing any progress (any info/warning msgs) for last many hours, normally for success scenarios we see some warnings/information messages in the log  and it gives  indication that process is running.

[JustinDallas]

I've run into similar scenarios whereby the NPrinting Server will just hang. And when you go to Task Executions, you will see it "Running". The only solution I've found is to restart the server. I'm on Qlik NPrinting Nov. 2018 if that helps.

[Digvijay_Singh]

Thanks for sharing your experience.  We are on Sept 2018. We don't need to restart the server, as other smaller jobs are getting executed successfully. Its strange, we don't see memory or CPU usage even more than 50%. Looks like a bug to me, Nprinting should have provision to throw error and abort the job with warnings/errors.

[JustinDallas]

Other jobs will run, but do the tasks that are hung up run successfully when their trigger comes around again?

[Digvijay_Singh]

Not yet tested this, this is twice a month activity, test run and prod run. I am seeing this for the first time for one of our high volume task

[Lech_Miszkiewicz]

Hi,

This looks like a big task. Assuming that original task took 9 hrs i would assume addition of "few cycles" will extend this time a lot. 

I would observe if there is any progress in task generation process and would investigate why this task took 9 hrs to generate in first place. Was it because of number of recipients, different cycles and filters, or just design?

regards

Lech

[Digvijay_Singh]

Its because of no of power point reports we are generating in the folder. Separate report for each client. Report has paging using another field so some reports are even >50 MB.

We kept on increasing charts, calculated dimensions, few extensions are also being used. Everything runs fine when I use filter and do chunking of 50 reports per run using filters.

Do you think improving RAM or CPU would help to at least finish the job. We are ok if it takes 13-14 hours but at least it should finish the job.

OR is there a way I can trigger one Nprinting job when another one is finished. Since I need to run the same job 5 times with different filter values, if I can just link them, it would help me to avoid manual intervention to start 2nd one when 1st lot is finished.

Thanks for your help!

[Ruggero_Piccoli]

Hi,

You added not one but more cycles on a report that was already big and this is the reason why it slowed down. This is a normal behaviour. The content of this page could help you to improve the performances https://help.qlik.com/en-US/nprinting/November2018/Content/NPrinting/DeployingQVNprinting/Performanc....

My first suggestion is to remove Cycles, Levels, Pages ets. For example, if you add a cycle by year and you have 3 distinct values Qlik NPrinting need to apply 3 filters, one for year and create 3 files. Then you add a cycle by Country and you have 10 countries so Qlik NPrinting have to create all possible combinations of years and countries 3x10=30 filters and 30 files to be generated. Then you add a cycle by product category, suppose you have 20 categories. So 3x10x20=600 combinations, 600 filters to by applied and 600 files. Maybe inside you have also Pages or Levels...

Best Regards,

Ruggero