Qlikview Desktop crashes PC

[jonoogle]

This is a problem I have brought up in the past with Qlik Support but never had any action taken and I think it's perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Qlik. Have you ever made a mistake in a load or an expression which causes Qlikview desktop to take up ALL of the CPU of your machine so the only remedy is to reset the PC, since you can't even kill the client? This used to happen to me more frequently; now maybe twice a month. Other than the problem of rebooting, often it also means losing data in other applications which were opened before the crash.

It should be technically possible for Qlik to limit the CPU usage of the desktop client.

Qlik..Please, please, address this problem.

[marcus_sommer]

Within the user-properties in tab general in the bottom right-area you could specify by the working sets how much RAM from the available RAM will QlikView consume. From your total amount of RAM you need a certain part for windows depending of the windows release and various settings on them and for your other running applications (whereby if you work with qlik you shouldn't do many resource-intensive tasks parallel and of course saving these application regularly).

AFAIK QlikView Desktop couldn't limit the CPU consumption but you could limit it from the OS and/or BIOS side if your machine has several cores. Another more easier way would be to reduce the priority of the qlik-process within the taskmanager. I could imagine that there are possibilities to start QlikView always mit a low process-priority with a batch-file or a file-link. I think if you searched for this by google you will find various hints how it could be done.

Beside them I must admit that I experience crashes very very rarely and that even if the RAM+CPU consumption goes to 100% (thats not rarely) my machine doesn't crash - it's quite slow of course but it react. Therefore it could be that some of your settings aren't very suitable and/or that your machine has serious problems with the temperatur and the crashes are caused from this.

Further I assume that you didn't handle huge amounts of data with the desktop client and quite often are high consumptions of CPU+RAM caused from poorly designed datamodels. Therefore before playing with the above mentioned topics take a look on your datamodels and ensure that there are no synthetic keys and/or any circular loops. Quite helpful is in such cases to open a qvw without data and then to use the debugger and to reduce there the max. number of to loading records.

- Marcus

[jonoogle]

Thanks for the response.

I tried both setting the affinity to use two cores (out of 4) and also lowering the max working set to 70% and I still get a crash. Actually it's not a crash, but as you mention a "slow-down", but the "slow-down" leaves the machine in a state where CTRL-ALT-DEL does not work, mouse moves, but other than that nothing else happens. I had the task manager open but could not even click on the process to kill it. The system doesn't respond. You can't wait it out, because it never comes alive again (I've waited up to an hour).

I have also tried BES, Battle Encoder Shirase 1.7.5 & 1.6.3: Controls Per-Process CPU Usage ‌with no great results.

It's not huge amounts of data, and the problem doesn't derive necessarily from synthetic keys/circular loops, rather than making a mistake when developing a data model or building a chart, where I might mistakenly create a very large data set  by accident/mistake. The punishment for making this mistake, and it could happen simply by an expression on a chart, is that you have to reboot the machine.

I am pretty sure that you can build a windows app which does not take all of the system resources.

BTW, I did open a ticket on this with Qlik but in the end the ticket was not resolved and it was closed.

I can't believe that other users don't run into this problem.

[jonoogle]

I spent more time looking at this. WIth task manager open and looking at performance issues, the problem is memory. Qlik takes up, almost instantly, in my current "test case", 100% of memory. I have working sets under user preferences set to 50%. And I can assure you with 100% of physical memory taken over, there is no way to get control of the machine without rebooting.

I've included an excerpt from the "Help" in the manual. I am not sure how to interpret this, but the maximum amount of physical memory certainly exceeds the 50% I specified in this setting.

I'm considering logging this as a ticket.

------------------------

This control sets the minimum and maximum of the physical amount of RAM that can be used by an application. This way it is possible to control if an application can be swapped out of physical memory or not. However, there are no guarantees that the operating system can serve the process with the amount of memory set here.

Using too high settings will degrade the performance of other processes on the computer, this may however be desirable if the computer is dedicated for QlikView.

Do not change these settings unless you are well acquainted with Windows Virtual Memory Manager! Read more about working sets in the Microsoft Windows documentation.

The settings are:

Low

sets the minimum amount of memory, in percentage, to be allocated to the application/process.

High

sets the maximum amount of memory, in percentage, to be allocated to the application/process.

Cache

sets the amount of memory, in percentage, to be used as cache for the application/process.

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[marcus_sommer]

It sounds that the working set configuration didn't work. I have never tested it by the desktop client I know only that they will work on the server-side. Maybe there are some factors which influence these settings, for example the used QV release (maybe there is a bug), the OS release and/or certain settings to them (virtual RAM, page-file, ...), RAM settings for your graphics board or any special settings within the QV settings.ini and/or the "easter egg" and probably some more.

- Marcus

[effinty2112]

Hi Jonathon,

This isn't an answer to your question but when this thing happens don't reboot your machine. In your windows task manager find QlikView in the Applications tab and right mouse button click. Select Go To Process, RMB click the process and select End Process.

It's much easier than a reboot.

Hope this is a little help.

Cheers

Andrew

[jonoogle]

Hi Andrew,

I don't think you understand the problem. The PC is no longer responsive. I cannot click on ANYTHING. The last test I did I had task manager open and the performance tab on. RAM went up to 100% within 10 seconds and couldn't click on anything. Reboot is the only choice.

jon

[jonoogle]

I am using the absolutely latest release of QV Desktop 12.10 SR7. This has persisted over the past 2+ years of Qlik Desktop clients as far as I have experienced. It could be there are other factors but in spite of this there the app should be able to limit itself so that it doesn't take up all available resources of the machine to the point where you can't even kill the process itself.

[marcus_sommer]

Of course you are right the working set configurations should work. AFAIK the intention of them is to ensure that there are always enough resources for the OS.

Beside them have you tried it with different machines to exclude possible hardware-errors with corrupt RAM or something similar and possible misconfigurations maybe some essential services and/or the graphics-driver run not with the necessary priority and will be therefore unloaded from the RAM if there are a high RAM consumption which then caused the unresponsiveness?

- Marcus

[jonoogle]

That's a good point to try on other hardware. I will test this out. My colleague who has a totally different hardware config (laptop as compared to my desktop machine), also has had similar problems. But it is worth a test.