Slow performance from BOBJ and Web Intelligence

[keithfisherdsc]

Hello,

I have an issue with a client where performance for the Launchpad, opening Web Intelligence reports and opening queries in WebI is slow. It can take 30 seconds or more from the authentication screen to the documents view at logon, over 3 minutes to open a large report for editing, and almost a minute to open the query panel and view WebI queries.

The problem system is 4.2 SP6 running on a Windows Server 2016 virtual server, with dedicated resource. It has 8 cores of AMD Opteron Processor 6172 at 2.1 GHz and 24GB RAM. I am using Chrome v76 on the desktop of the server itself.

At first logon of a day the logon process takes up to a minute, with this output in the Chrome console:

This 'Waiting (TTFB)' (Time to first byte) is consistent for the first logon on a day - subsequent logins are quicker.

Then when I come to open a large report, albeit one where the data has been purged from I get these timing from the Chrome console:

52 seconds to download the file

27 seconds wait time again - after which the report first page has come to the screen and the structure/formatting is visible.

then the left hand pane to display the universe available objects takes another 3.7 minutes to become visible.

I accept that this report is very large - 19 queries, 21 report tabs, dozens of variables. However I loaded the same report into another system and had these comparative timings:

1. logon wait time is 5 seconds vs 48 in client system
2. opening the document: viewDocument.jsp total time is 15.78 seconds vs 52.46 on client's machine - the major difference is that on the client's server this is mainly in download time, on the test machine it is all in TTFB.
3. opening the document: report.jsp total time is 7.49 seconds vs 27.48 on client's server
4. waiting for left panel: ajaxIncObjects total time 39.21 seconds vs 3.7 minutes on client's server.

For the test machine timings I am using Chrome v76 not on the server desktop but on my own laptop. The server is Windows 2012 R2 running Intel Core i7-4790 @ 3.6GHz (8 cores) with 32 GB RAM on a cloud hosted VM.

These timings show some obvious findings - that a faster server returns data more quickly even over a wider network. However the logon wait time far exceeds anything I've seen at other clients, and the general slow timings for things like opening of query panels, moving between queries, opening smaller reports etc etc suggests something is not right.

Can anyone help with suggestions of what might be wrong, where the extreme latency is coming from?

thanks

Keith

[denis_konovalov]

1. 24gb ram is below minimum required for BI4.x
2. disk I/O is often the first and major bottleneck and contributor to slow systems in virtual environments. And slow disk i/o will make BI crawl.
3. You can run end to end trace of the affected workflows and see where time is being spent within BOE process flows (KBA 1861180)

[keithfisherdsc]

Hi Denis,

thanks for the reply 🙂

The PAM suggests 16GB is the minimum RAM required for BI4.2 and we do have some clients with 16-24GB whose systems run quicker than this.

I've asked the questions about disk IO and am waiting for a reply from IT on that - also to see what other VMs might exist on the host machine

I'll check that SAP note and see what I can glean from it, thanks

Keith