What is this service ?
com.ibm.rqm.xslfo.service.IXSLFOService
I "caught" it under the Active Services page on one of our RQM servers and it had been
running > 1h. From stack trace it appeared to be
reading information about files and directories ( from what I do not know).
What I do know is that whist this was happening the java process for this RQM was loading
the CPU at 50-60% and the Kernel CPU% was also in this range.
WHAT IS THIS AND WHAT TRIGGERS ?
Kevin
I "caught" it under the Active Services page on one of our RQM servers and it had been
running > 1h. From stack trace it appeared to be
reading information about files and directories ( from what I do not know).
What I do know is that whist this was happening the java process for this RQM was loading
the CPU at 50-60% and the Kernel CPU% was also in this range.
WHAT IS THIS AND WHAT TRIGGERS ?
Kevin
2 answers
The IXSLFO service is the service that handles requests for PDFs.
Generating a PDF in 2.x is fairly resource intensive. It is not inconceivable that a request for a PDF could take more than an hour. Typically, we see this kind of impact when you have a large Test Plan or even Master Test Plan and one or more people request "comprehensive" PDFs. The "comprehensive" option follows the entire relationship tree for the Test Plan so these documents can grow to be thousands or even tens of thousands of pages (depending how deep and/or broad your relationship tree is).
In 2.x you can mitigate the impact of this through an option in the "advanced server properties" that will allow you to limit the number of links the Print Engine will follow when generating a comprehensive PDF.
See this technote:
https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21454115&wv=1
Something else you may want to consider is some education for your users. We find that often users choose the "comprehensive" option without actually knowing what it does. If the user only needs a copy of the Test Plan itself, the "artifact summary" will do that without traversing all the relationships. Generating an artifact summary is significantly faster and less resource intensive, but we find that users default to using the comprehensive option whether they need that extra data or not. We've made a few user experience changes to try to make this more intuitive, and there will be more to come.
We've gone to great lengths to redesign and rebuild the entire Print Engine in v3.0.1 using all that we have learned from the 2.x engine and the users that use this feature. I understand that upgrading to 3.0.1 is not a quick or easy solution, but wanted to assure you that we were very aware of the limitations of the 2.x engine and that those limitations have been largely dealt with. You may want to download 3.0.1 and give it a try.
Generating a PDF in 2.x is fairly resource intensive. It is not inconceivable that a request for a PDF could take more than an hour. Typically, we see this kind of impact when you have a large Test Plan or even Master Test Plan and one or more people request "comprehensive" PDFs. The "comprehensive" option follows the entire relationship tree for the Test Plan so these documents can grow to be thousands or even tens of thousands of pages (depending how deep and/or broad your relationship tree is).
In 2.x you can mitigate the impact of this through an option in the "advanced server properties" that will allow you to limit the number of links the Print Engine will follow when generating a comprehensive PDF.
See this technote:
https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21454115&wv=1
Something else you may want to consider is some education for your users. We find that often users choose the "comprehensive" option without actually knowing what it does. If the user only needs a copy of the Test Plan itself, the "artifact summary" will do that without traversing all the relationships. Generating an artifact summary is significantly faster and less resource intensive, but we find that users default to using the comprehensive option whether they need that extra data or not. We've made a few user experience changes to try to make this more intuitive, and there will be more to come.
We've gone to great lengths to redesign and rebuild the entire Print Engine in v3.0.1 using all that we have learned from the 2.x engine and the users that use this feature. I understand that upgrading to 3.0.1 is not a quick or easy solution, but wanted to assure you that we were very aware of the limitations of the 2.x engine and that those limitations have been largely dealt with. You may want to download 3.0.1 and give it a try.