Enable the "Enable Memory Analysis" on the Webi Processing Servers

[Paul1202]

Hi, when running the BI Platform Support Tool, we got alerts that we had to enable the "Enable Memory Analysis" on the Web Processing Servers. But we intentionally disabled this, as we saw it is not a  good practice anymore in BI 4.x. See Ted Ueda's post in

Section "BI 4.1 - Do Not Enable Memory Analysis"

So for me this is confusing.

If the above mentioned SCN-Post is true, then maybe the BI Platform Support Tool must be adapted so it does not recommend anymore to enable this setting ?

Can anybody of the SAP-BI4 specialist give a final statement for this ?

Many thanks

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Ocula,

Yes this was changed in the 2.0 version of the BI support tool, now it shows a warning when the "Enable Memory Analysis" option is checked:

Kind regards,
Moslem

[former_member190767]

Hi All,

With the latest SP's in BI4.1 as well as BI4.2 the "Enable Memory Analysis" setting is not needed anymore.. in Fact, for BI4.2 this setting is by default disabled (versus the 4.0 /4.1 setting, where is by default has been enabled).

If you are on BI4.1 SP05 or higher, it would be recommended to disable the Memory Analysis.

Kind Regards

Merlijn

[Former Member]

Hi Merlijn,

I think we need to be at least on BI 4.1 SP07 to disable the Memory Analysis as their was a memory leak bug identified by SAP team in extensive testing after disabling the Memory Analysis. That bug has been fixed in SP07.

Refer : by

Regards,

Kashif

[Toby_Johnston]

Yes, the alert is triggered when it finds Webi with Memory Analysis enabled.  In the 64-bit world, Memory Analysis adds unnecessary overhead to the Webi server (it was used in 32-bit XI 3.1 to manage the memory limitations of 32-bit processes)

[Former Member]

we are following this approach as well on 64 Bit and have this disabled, but a side effect is that of course there is no threshold anymore for the WebI server, so in you have a large system and huge reports they can consume as much as memory as possible (in our system we have Webi processes consuming more than 100 GB RAM), doesn't it make sense to still have somehow a limit to be set to avoid this? Or at least have a parameter to recycle the service in case of such a growth and stop accepting new requests or queue them?

[Paul1202]

We have about the same as what Mirko mentioned : some very huge reports which are consuming very much memory. Now and then we still have  WPS-Crashes. Most probably caused by these WEBI-Reports which are using a lot of memory

[Toby_Johnston]

Big complicated Webi Reports will use a lot of memory, there's no way around that.  However, the key is to throttle the memory used by a single WIPS instance by limiting the number of max connections.  It's not a perfect science but more about finding the right balance of # of WIPS across the landscape and # of max connections.

The tip to disable Memory Analysis came from the Webi Development team itself as it is no longer necessary to prevent exceeding the 2GB threshold.  This was a workaround in the XI 3.1 32-bit world to prevent the process from crashing.

If you are getting Webi crashes, this is likely due to something else and should be investigated on a case by case basis.

I'm going to page out the uber Webi experts to comment further.  Paging Ted and JB

[former_member59613]

As Toby mentioned, we would want to investigate the root cause of the crashes. It might be related to memory but the only time a WIPS should crash, due to memory, is if it can't allocate enough of it to fulfill the requests it is currently handling.  This would indicate your server was at capacity and you should see that surface in other ways.

Disabling the Memory Analysis will stop the monitoring of the memory (virtual memory) by the WIPS server and will disable the automatic rejection of new requests once the server exceeds a certain threshold.  As mentioned, this was originally introduced so our process wouldn't exceed 2GB (32-bit OS limitation)  So, the processes should recycle and release the memory back to the OS if it sits idle for a certain amount of time (20 minutes by default) and has handled 50 requests (by default).

If your process doesn't recycle on its own, the problem might be that there is no idle period where it can recycle and release the memory.  If this is the case, you could decrease the idle timeout, add more WIPS so the load balancing allowed for longer idle times, or schedule short windows each evening where the WIPS was manually recycled using a script.

Thanks

Jb

[Henry_Banks]

http://scn.sap.com/community/businessobjects-web-intelligence/blog/2016/02/01/should-i-enable-memory...

Hi Mirko,

Here's a blog post that would be of interest to you (link above)

Kind regards,

H

[Paul1202]

Meanwhile I have installed BI Platform Support tool 2.0 . And the Landscape Report generated with 2.0 does not mention anymore that we have to enable the "Enable Memory Analysis". SO I assume it has been changed intentionally in the 2.0 tool.