COGNOS Business Intelligence Series 7

Chapter 3: Control Processes
2. From the Edit menu, click Properties, and then click the Settings tab.
3. In the Maximum Processes box (Process Control), type the number of processes.
4. If you have defined mirror references and want to give processing preferences to the local
source in order to queue requests rather than forward them to the mirror reference, type the
number of requests to queue (beyond the maximum) in the Local Process Threshold box.
5. Click OK.
Tips
• If, after adjusting the number of processes, you determine that more processing power is
required, you can use mirror references to process remotely, or you may need to upgrade your
computing resources.
Limit the Processing Time
You can set an absolute time limit that the query or report processor spends on any request.
Adjusting this timeout may be useful for cases of "runaway" queries that would otherwise
consume up to 15 minutes (the default) of processor time.
Steps
1. In PowerPlay Enterprise - Server Administration, select a cube or report.
2. From the Edit menu, click Properties, and then click the Settings tab.
3. In the Request Timeout box (Process Control), type the number of seconds.
4. Click OK.
Tips
• This setting applies to all requests submitted by all users. Setting it too low may result in a
high number of query or report failures.
Configure How Windows Processes are Scheduled
As a new request is received from a PowerPlay Windows application, there may be a delay before
that request gets processed by a query processor (if it is busy). For any cube, you can choose how
to distribute requests based on how busy each processor is, by setting a threshold to control the
load balancing for these requests.
The setting represents a ratio of delay time to active processing time.
• A value of 0 means no delay, so each request is submitted to the first available processor,
similar to the way Web requests are handled.
• A value from 1 to 9 means each request is submitted to the next processor whose ratio of
delay time to processing time is lower than the number specified. For example, a value of 5
means each request is submitted to the first processor that has less than a 50% ratio of delay
time to processing time.
• A value of 10 means each request is submitted to the next processor in sequence, regardless of
the load on that processor.
Steps
1. In PowerPlay Enterprise - Server Administration, select a cube.
2. From the Edit menu, click Properties, and then click the Settings tab.
3. In the Scheduling Threshold(s) box (Process Control), type a number from 0 to 10.
4. Click OK.
Stop Processing Requests
You can disable a PowerPlay server, folder, or individual cubes or reports to temporarily prevent
the processor from accepting requests. This is useful, for example, when you have to replace a
cube or report, or perform maintenance on several items at once. You can also use this feature to
stop any runaway processes.
34 Cognos PowerPlay (R)