We have about 40 reports/dashboard objects that are scheduled to run after our weekly ETL load. The consultants that set up our BCA schedule used FileWatcher to look for dummy reports before launching each set of reports. In other words, about three-to-five reports are tied to each watched-file, and a watched-file launches every 15 minutes. They said they needed to do this because BCA could not process all 40 files at once.
Has anybody heard of this sort of load balancing? IS THIS REALLY NECESSARY???
40 reports can run parrelly on the BCA but if your BCA can handle this load. If the reports are small and does not deal with large volume of data then on a 4 CPU processor ( Pentium III/4) you can them parallely.
If you provide more info on your BCA server then we can elabortae on it more.
I’m on a project currently where the company uses the same kind of ‘load balancing’ so it is used in some places. We have a few hundred reports in several different enviornments that are always queued to run, and each report has its own trigger file…seems to be working fine here though.
Not really necessary at all. You should have plent of bandwidth to handle 40 reports. You can adjust the BCA to handle a concurrent number of reports. It will manage rest for you.
Based on your location and the advice you were given, I can guess who your consultants were.
Thanks, all, for the input. Our BCA machine is a single XEON 2.0 GHz processor with 4 gigs of ram. It also hosts AP Foundation. The reports seem to run fast enough but I remember some problems when it was first set up which is why the consultants opted for the current structure. Sounds like I should just try running with all at once and see what happens, then tweak the concurrency settings.
Your BCA configuration is real good. Itshould be able to handle 40 concurrent jobs. You might need to tweak some settings. Might have to create dual BCA scheduler’s for same BCA .