Cache Pages

rbuser

Hello,
I am using report builder 7.03 and was testing printing performance and
various different settings, one that I tried was Cache Pages and had a
question about it.

My overall test print run is about 3500 pages, this takes less that 30 mins
to stabilise on the preview, not bad. Then on print it was taking 90 mins,
(roughly 30 mins accessing data and the 60 mins going over each page) when I
used cache pages I could then print to about 70 mins, great !!! But the
question is when I use cache pages it takes a further 20 mins to close the
preview, compared to less than 5 mins with no cache pages. So the resulting
saving if fairly minimal.

From what I have seen the close action just appears to be freeing memory, so
I presume takes more time as it has to free the extra cache pages memory ?

Is this normal ?

Is there any way I can stop this happening ? (or speed it up ?)

thanks
Alex

nicocizik

Hi Alex,

The CachePages property does exactly what it implies. It caches each page
of your report in memory therefore removing the need to regenerate them
while printing to the printer saving you some time in this process. However
simply not freeing this memory after closing ReportBuilder would be
considered quite a memory leak . A couple things you might try to speed
up the process of printing these large reports are to disable the report
outline and index your dataset to reduce data access time.

--
Regards,

Nico Cizik
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com

rbuser

Hello,
I have tried improving the indexing it is a SQL Server DB so I have used
the profiler with the index wizard, this announced a saving of 17% the
result : nothing, nada, zilch, rein ;-)) I have checked the outline and this
is already disabled. I have also tried to reduce the datapipe lines and
optimise the report in general, also to cache external graphics files but
nothing will work and everything points to bad or excessive memory
allocation within reportbuilder.

If I tracker the memory usage it uses between 400-600M in virtual memory
(for the report below) but appears to allocate (and de-allocate) it in very
small slow packets. If I compare the PDF result it is only 60M . Another
thing I read about was the use of report builder's SQL objects that they
where opened and closed all the time but could be kept open.

I just think there must be something that could be done ? What about later
versions 8 or 9 has any of these aspect been optimised ?

brgds
Alex

nicocizik

Hi Alex,

Depending on what your report contains, the memory usage could vary. We
have tested ReportBuilder with multiple thousand page reports before and
have never seen this much memory usage. What does this report consist of?
Are there numerous different images on each page or is it primarily text
based?

--
Regards,

Nico Cizik
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com

rbuser

Hello,
In total there are 1000 images in the 3500 pages, they are tif group 4
or CGM format, roughly A4 size. There are also 450 blank (cover pages) and
the rest is RTF text, the composant that is used is WPTools.

I could sent the rtm file, the actual DB or resulting PDF file may be
difficult as I would have to ask the end customer premission.

brgds
Alex

nicocizik

Hi Alex,

ReportBuilder does not compress the image files like most PDF creation
devices do. Even using the Tif format, by my calculations, 1000 A4 sized
images adds up to well over 400MB so if you are caching every page in
memory, the memory use you are experiencing is to be expected.

--
Regards,

Nico Cizik
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com

rbuser

Hello,
The total number of images 1022 and the total size is 25M, this is
because the format is either tif group 4, (like a fax) compression or cgm
(vectorial), so the average size is about 25K per image, so it is not just
the image size that is creating a problem.
Today I have been testing without the cache pages and would estimate the
memory usage without the cache pages to be around 150M, don't know if this
will give you an ideas ?

brgds
Alex

nicocizik

Hi Alex,

As a test, try using the TppReport.CacheManager to change the way
ReportBuilder caches your pages. For instance, you can change the
TppReport.CacheManager.CacheType to ppctFile and define the
CacheManager.CachePath to a temp file. This should take care of the memory
problem and may speed things up a bit.

--
Regards,

Nico Cizik
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com