*IMPORTANT RANT*
Hello All,
I'm seeking an appropriate way to apply memory 'Working Set Limits' to desktop sessions.
In QlikView desktop 'User Preferences' it will allow high & low percentage thresholds to be assigned with regards to RAM consumption, but these seem to be completely ignored (and have been seemingly inert for several releases).
Instead, when an inefficient calculation occurs on the UI, the physical memory fills up to capacity then switches over to virtual memory, at which point the machine can slow down to the point of unresponsiveness for extended periods of time.
The natural reaction after staring at a frozen screen for a while, are to force-quit the process or reboot, resulting in the loss of the last round of development changes/reload/etc... (my latest observation was an 8GB physical RAM machine, filled up to 24 GB of virtual memory, in crawling .1GB increments over the space of 20 minutes. My choice? Either ditch the development round, or wait it out.)
From descriptions found elsewhere: QV-12-1-Working-Set-Limits
"In my experience, the memory management in QV 12.10 SR3 is pretty much the same as in 11.20 SR16. If a user creates an object which necessitates a large amount of memory to perform the calculations or creates a bad expression resulting in a Cartesian product, etc., Windows may, at its discretion, switch over to paging. This isn't itself a QlikView issue, per se."
If Windows is making decisions about how deeply Qlik processes are allowed to delve into virtual paging memory, those decisions are not making Qlik look good. It freezes so many sessions the development process becomes abusive, and memory cut-off thresholds need to be applied much earlier. (there really should be more prominent control available on the Qlik side)
I'm serious... this is a huge issue; stop everything you're doing and develop a fix or dependable mechanism now. Throughout personal Qlik history this has probably resulted in the destruction or extended disruption of maybe 1 out of 5 development sessions? It might be THE chronic problem. (if I'm the only one that got this treatment, then.. that's a jerk move, but... if this is happening to all developers, think about the serious adoption friction!)
Maybe as a developer gets more experienced, they know to be wary, but even then it also creates a constant peril that some inadvertant interaction, a cycle into a large dimension, or a 'clear-selections' is going to activate one of these 'memory bloom booby traps'.
**END RANT**
