Hello,

My current client is trying to move its WF Reporting Server from Win to either AS400 or AIX. Performance is a big concern. Will the performance depend on hardware or the AS400 has clear advantages over AIX? Currently, WF mainly connects to JD Edwards on AS400. We do see lots of crashed agents on the server and reports take long time to run. We are also planning to increase the users by 500+.

Thanks,
Sayed

I can't answer the question regarding AIX vs AS400, though I don't think it should make any difference, but "we do see lots of crashed agents on the server and reports take long time to run" could be due to programs not efficiently written. Have you traced the SQL verify the efficiency of the programs?

We are very happy with WF on AIX and, after one user took all the  's out of his -HTMFORMs, we have very few crashed agents. We are running 765 for the reporting servers.

However, if you are accessing JD Edwards on AS/400, doesn't it seem more logical to put the reporting server there?

Can you have IBM help you size the box so that you won't have performance issues.

And please make note of Francis' comment. It is very germaine to this discussion. Poorly written code will run slowly whereever you put it.

Thank You guys! I do think the crashed agents are due to poorly written code or the JDE adapter for WF 713 has bugs. I will need to investigate that.

We are in a similar situation and are doing everything we can to move off of the AS400. The AIX server is much faster. Now as far as JDE goes, on the AS400 that is a DB2 interface. I have not worked with it on AIX, but it is my understanding it can be done, but is an ORACLE interface. If you are currently running JDE on the AS400 are you planning to port the data to the AIX through an ETL process? or connect to it directly through a data adapter? or run WebFocus on both machines? There is not a simple answer that one is better than the other. It is going to depend on your systems and budget. All of the options have a cost involved. Discuss the options with your Tech rep and get estimates on what it would cost for each option and what are the advantages/disadvantages of each option.

Hey Pat,

Why did you guys move WF out of AS400? and why do you think it is working faster on AIX? I am assuming WF Reporting server would be 1/2 the price for AIX vs. AS400. We are thinking about putting the reporting server on AIX and connect to JDE on AS400 with an adapter. Do you see any issues with that?

Thanks,
Sayed

We are still running a few FOCUS programs on the AS400 and I am doing everything I can to get them to WF because FOCUS for the AS400 is no longer supported. We have not moved WF off of the AS400 yet, but we are paying licensing fees on all of our servers. Our data is scattered across all 3 servers and doesn't "talk" to one another. Be aware that the initial cost for the data adapters is high. The cost of WF on the AIX + RC + WF on the NT is about 3/4 of WF on the AS400. But the initial outlay for data adapters for us to move everything to the AIX was more than double our total annual cost. In my opinion is it worth it? If you want up to the minute data, Yes! Could I convince my company of that? NO. We have applications that need data from JDE and Oracle. Currently we run a lot of batch processes and FTP the data from one server to the other. This means I have redundant files on each server that I have to try to keep in sync. I see fewer issues with using a data adapter and putting everything on one server than with not doing it. If you are with a large company, especially if you have several developers or user developers the savings in labor should pay for it.

Another option is an ETL process that extracts the data and builds a data warehouse/datamarts. I have been in several companies that this worked very well. The last one I was with refreshed the data warehouse every 8 minutes. That is what this company is moving toward, but we are way behind. We have another system that already has the data adapters and we are going to us it to load a data warehouse.

Thank You all for your help.

In general, crashed agents means a bug in our software. They should be submitted for fixes. At a minimum, the reason for the crashes should be determined so you can implement a work around. Depending on how you are configured, crashed agents can cause performance problems. First of all, they occupy virtual memory (though they are likely paged out). Secondly, they are counted against your quota of active agents. If 17 of 20 agents are used up as "crashed" that leaves you running with 3 which can cause two affects when they are all in use
1. If queing is off, you will get msgs that there are no agents are available.
2. If queuing is on, the server attach manager will wait till an agent becomes free. The user perception is that the report is taking forever to run, but the reality is that most of the time the report request is waiting for a worker agent.
..
So check if you have queuing ... and clean out those crashed agents periodically.

Hello Brian,


Thank you for the insight. This is what I have on my default Service configuration

Service


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Changing values with an asterisk (*) requires restarting the server
Press "Save" button to save the changes

service DEFAULT
maximum 50
number_ready 10
deployment private selected
Queuing on selected
maximum_q 10
queue_limit 60
idle_session_limit -1
idle_agent_limit 120
profile
cpu_limit -1
memory_limit -1
connection_limit -1
max_connections_per_user 4
agent_refresh 100
owner_control_request n selected


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

I also have "crashed_cleanup = on" in my edaserve.cfg, so crashed agents are being cleaned up.
Is there any other configuration change I should make to optimize our environment?

Thanks,
Sayed

Sayed,

I'm just curious. What type of applications are you running against JDE? Batch? Self-Service? Ad-Hoc queries? All of the above?

Daniel,

Mostly Self-Service and Ad-Hoc. There may be some Batch that I am not aware of.

Sayed