Spectrum Spatial (SSA/LIM)

Not sure what other administrators are experiencing or how your servers are setup... Anyway, we are experiencing an issue where V17 of MI Pro which we use to load maps to SSA is able to open a local workspace however is not able to function/manipulate that workspace. MIP is installed on the SSA server and is pointing to local flat .tab files, nothing fancy. The moment we reset the PB Spectrum Technology Platform service then MI Pro is able to run perfect and can easily manipulate and load maps into SSA. I have attached some screenshots of the Task Manager. SSA consumes a lot of RAM, it appears when this RAM is released by restarting the above mentioned service then MIP V17 is happy.

Thoughts?

Do we allocate more RAM to say 30Gb? Is there a way of restricting SSA to say 20Gb so MIP has RAM to access?

Regards,

Tony Jordan

Hi Tony,

the memory requirements for SSA expect no other tool on the machine that utilises a lot of memory. Spectrum and Spectrum Spatial Analyst are Java processes which are limited in memory usage by default. Each Tomcat Process will use maximum 1GB of memory, the Java processes, assuming no values have changed, will utilise max around 10GB in total.

For you it is good to increase the memory of the machine. SSA will not consume more memory.

Andreas

?Tony,

I am not sure what you mean about Pro not being able to manipulate the workspace. Is it that mouse operations are unresponsive? Drawing is slow?

I have a number of VMs  all 16 gig or less and they have Spectrum (just LIM, Routing and Geocoding) and they all have v16 or v17 of Pro.  Our VM infrastructure is pretty variable in performance so sometimes things seem slow but other times they are fine. 

I am a bit confused about your references to SSA (application) and Spectrum server. They are separate. The TomCats (3) in your process list are SSA and the other 4 Java processes are Spectrum with LIM. 

When you say you reset  "PB Spectrum Technology Platform service" that means that you restart it, right? While that will force Spectrum's memory to reinitialize, it will not do anything to SSA, other than SSA will not work until Spectrum is back up.  SSA restart happens by restarting the 3 separate Windows services.

So it sounds like Spectrum (not SSA) is using either a lot of CPU or memory or both and when you restart it and it is not doing much, Pro works fine. 

I would use a tool like Process Explorer which shows more detail of CPU and Memory and describe what in Pro is unresponsive. 

Here's a picture of Process Explorer (download from Microsft) which has much more information. You can also hover over each process and see what part of Spectrum or SSA is taking memory or CPU. Run it as administrator for full access. Post your findings here. 

@Tony Jordan? Your total memory usage looks pretty similar to ours, we have 20Gb made available to our GIS server with only a few smaller licensing servers running on the same server. Leaving us with 15Gb in use and 5Gb spare overhead. We don't have MI installed on the server though, we do the map production and upload from our PCs locally.

I'm having the same problem as Tony with MIP17 - pre-existing workspaces open, but I cannot edit them as clicking on icons does not work, program defaults to the Home menu and will not change, and sometimes the window freezes and will not close so I have to force quit the program.

I'm planning on getting our IT guy to up the RAM in my computer to see if that improves things. I can report the results here if anyone is interested.

We at PB would be very interested in more information on these situations from you or anyone else concerned.  A few questions:

1) This behavior is presumably new to v17. Did you upgrade from 16 or any earlier version? ?

2) Tony was having issues on a server where Analyst, Spectrum and MapInfo Pro were installed. Is this your case as well or is this just with MapInfo Pro?

3) There is a new feature that allows capturing usage so that we can better understand how people are using the software. It connects to the internet periodically. You were given the option of allowing this or not on install. Are you using this feature?

4) Can you describe the kinds of workspaces you use? Do they have a lot of tables and are those tables local or on a file share? I am not forgetting that this worked ok before but it is good to get an idea of what is in the workspace.

5) Do you use any addins and if so can you list them?

I agree to Eric. This is an unusual behaviour. In addition to Eric, the only "normal" behaviour of MI Pro blocked after opening a workspace I can think of is when a thematic map needs to be calculated on lots of data. Is this the case in your workspaces?

Can you share the workspaces? Just the .wor file.

Regards

Andreas

I was using v16 previously, with no serious problems. After updating to v17, I had issues when opening existing workspaces (from local folders synced from Google Drive). Sometimes I cannot do anything with the workspaces - clicking icons doesn't work, I can't switch between menus. Sometimes it works, but very slowly. Sometimes I have to minimise the window, then maximise it before anything appears to happen.

The kinds of workspaces I use varies. It can be anything from a Bing Hybrid base map with a few polygons and waypoints on it, to base map + multiple polygon tables + table containing zoning data for all of NSW + vegetation cover for a Local Government area.

One of my colleagues is using v17 fairly efficiently (she certainly doesn't have the same problems as me), but she has noticed a lag so she has requested extra RAM for her laptop. We'll see how that goes.

The only addition to v17 I have that did not come with the install is the Concentric Ring Buffer plugin. I'm not using Analyst or Spectrum.

Andreas 27/6; Thanks for your reply, yes we will increase the RAM to 30Gb, hope that helps and if not will maintain and upload workspaces/maps to SSA via local PC.

Eric 29/6; Thanks for your reply, the workspace becomes unresponsive, it opens but that's it. When I refereed to SSA on the server I was speaking in broad terms about the whole base server install not the end user experience in a browser. In terms of the "PB Spectrum Technology Platform service", yes we 'restart' it. In the past where we have quirky things go on from the user SSA/Browser perspective including some changes that are made in the admin console that don't come through to the user, after refreshing caches in the browser if that doesn't help we simply restart the "PB Spectrum Technology Platform service", we have tried restarting the other 3x PB Analyst Admin/Connect/Locate services however they have done nothing to help, we always find the restart of the Platform Service the one that works. The Process Explorer sounds like a greatr idea to help us further pinpoint issues, we shall try.

William 2/7; Thanks for your feedback, we may need to run MIP from a local PC, we will first try bumping up the RAM to 30Gb though.

Frances 2/7; Thanks for your feedback, please keep us updated on how you go with increasing RAM and this issue.

Eric 2/7; Thanks for reaching out. We previously had V17 Beta installed on this server but never V16. Upon updating to V17 (official) we had install issues, we conveyed this to PBA Support and they instructed us to carryout uninstalling following their instructions, it was messy! While we have MIP17 installed we are having the issue as described. We have Customer Experience Program enabled so I assume this shares our usage as you have mentioned. Attached is one workspace that is structured very ons.similar to all that we have loaded in SSA, this one is the last one we were having issues with after opening until the RAM is released. We also have no additional add-ons.

Each case here could be different. While overtaxing a machine (server or not) can always be a cause for poor performance, it is not always memory and not always CPU.  It even can be disk speed if you are using a lot of disk based data like MapInfo Native tables.

Let's get some information clear. For Tony, it makes sense that Spectrum is the memory "hog" rather than Analyst although with just Spatial it should not be too big. Spectrum itself in version 12.x has 3 Java processes that are always there.  If the only module you have is Spatial (for Analyst) there should be 4.  With tools we can see what each process is taking up in memory and CPU and even disk I/o. However, if you are using the same version of Spectrum and Analyst and only upgraded MapInfo Pro, there are only 2 possibilities that I can see.

1) You were near the bad threshold before and v17 is using enough more memory to push it over the limit of usability.

2) Something in the Pro install/environment is using a lot of  .. (memory/cpu/...). Which we would want to figure out because adding memory may not do it or just postpone.

Now if other things  have changed such as the version of Spectrum and/or Analyst we would have to compare their usage.

As a test, I went to one of my VM where I have spectrum with Spatial maps, routing and geocoding and Analyst on the same VM. The VM has 16 gig of RAM and the vm is using about 25 gig. So virtual memory management is in place and things are not real speedy.

The memory is mostly using by my routing databases (the US has a lot of roads so is 4 gig ) and Geocoding and Spectrum itself. Analyst seems to have 1.5 gig and Pro 16 about  800Meg. The workspace has 6 maps, 3 browsers and about 12 tables overall, a few of which are decently large.  Closing v16 only show about the 800 released and starting up v17 with the same workspace was very similar in memory and I am able to pan and zoom and interact with the tool and layer control.  So no real difference. 

The workspace you sent did not seem to have anything all that interesting other than all the tables seem to be on a remote file share. I assume those are all MapInfo native tab files. There are a few themes in there that recalculate can take some time but I see no evidence of that.  Are the columns used in the themes indexed? If the tab files are readonly to you, Pro could be forced to use temporary indices.  But that would all be the same for 16 and 17.

So still a bit of a mystery. 

The usage tracking turned on might be worth checking and turning off and see if that matters.  Its on the options page under Application settings.  Worth a try.  Tools like Fiddler can be used with Windows applications to see if network, http activity is being too chatty. But easier to just turn it off and see if that changes anything. 

?