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By default Windchill is configured to capture execution metrics of all SQL statements sent to the database.  This data is used to populate some logged data (like the MethodServer Summary line, and other JDBC centric JMX measures) and is used by Windchill profiler as well.  The downside is the property is CPU intensive and can impact responsiveness of the Windchill server, although I'm not aware of any studies to test it's impact the last numbers I saw were a ~20% overhead on a ~16 second operation.  For sites using the PSM the JDBC data being captured by this property may no longer necessary too.

db.property: wt.pom.traceTiming.enable

The default setting is true, disable the tracing by setting the property to false.

This posting is not a recommendation to set this property to 'false' on a production server but rather to share that this setting can have an impact on overall Windchill performance and to encourage testing and the sharing of those results in the comments section.

After a Windchill system is restarted the first user(s) accessing the system can experience slower performance for some actions while numerous Windchill caches are being populated.  These caches could be pre-populated before users started using the system again by using the Apache 'ab' utility found in the Apache/bin directory. 

The usage is: ab -A user:pass "URL"

Where URL can be any Windchill.  When Windchill is using SSL the 'abs' utility should be used instead.

i.e.

D:\ptc\Windchill_10.0\Apache\bin\abs.exe -A username/password "https://pds.ptc.com/Windchill/app/#ptc1/project/listFiles?oid=OR%3Awt.projmgmt.admin.Project2%3A921844552&u8=1"

The output from the command also contains performance metrics from the request too.

Sample output:

D:\ptc\Windchill_10.0\Apache\bin\ab.exe http://www.google.com/

This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>

Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/

Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking www.google.com (be patient).....done

Server Software:        gws

Server Hostname:        www.google.com

Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /

Document Length:        13996 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1

Time taken for tests:   0.087 seconds

Complete requests:      1

Failed requests:        0

Write errors:           0

Total transferred:      14732 bytes

HTML transferred:       13996 bytes

Requests per second:    11.49 [#/sec] (mean)

Time per request:       87.009 [ms] (mean)

Time per request:       87.009 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Transfer rate:          165.35 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)

              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max

Connect:       26   26   0.0     26      26

Processing:    61   61   0.0     61      61

Waiting:       34   34   0.0     34      34

Total:         87   87   0.0     87      87

Тадададааа! Объявляем победителей!

Спасибо всем участникам, кто отпустил свою фантазию на волю! Мы оценивали макет на оригинальность, чувство юмора, концептуальность и просто должно было радовать глаз, к тому же это макет футболки, поэтому были некоторые технические ограничения.

"Благодаря" этим ограничениям у нас нет первого места. Рисунок Дмитрия Баранова нам очень понравился, но был слишком сложен для производства футболок. Только поэтому он занимает второе место. Вы посмотрите, какой концепт и идейность! За это Дмитрию Баранову уходит 3D манипулятор от партнера конкурса 3Dconnexion - Space Mouse Pro. Модель оснащена запатентованным датчиком с шестью степенями свободы (6Dof), который помогает легко перемещать модель или камеру в трехмерном пространстве. Простые операции нажатия, вытягивания, поворота и наклона джойстика 3Dconnexion позволяют смещать, масштабировать и поворачивать модель или камеру.

Дмитрий, я очень надеюсь, что вы поделитесь с нами своими впечатлениями от гаджета! Дмитрий, кстати, состоит в сообществе PTC ProRussia (но на результаты конкурса это никак не повлияло ).

А вот и макет:

Идея рисунка в том, что слово «PTC» как будто создано в Creo. Буква «P» - это трехмерная буква, «T» - это вытягивание эскиза, «С» - это эскиз. Карандаш и ластик (на которых написано Creo) показывают, что надпись была сделана с помощью инструментов Creo.

А третье место мы присуждаем Алексею Ушакову, ОАО "Арзамасский приборостроительный завод имени П.И. Пландина", г. Арзамас. За патриотизм, конечно же! и Алексею уходит Space Navigator от  3Dconnexion, который является запатентованной технологией 3Dconnexion 6DoF (шесть степеней свободы) – плавное и интуитивное управление 3D моделями и пространствами. Алексей, расскажите нам потом, понравился ли вам приз!

Победители буду награждены в конце PTCLive TechForum, который пройдет в 17 мая в Москве, в ЦМ по адресу Краснопресненская наб. 12, подъезд №4. Следит за форумом через он-лайн трансляцию, подробности http://liveforum.ptc.com/ Тем более, что оба победителя обещались быть на форму лично.

Дорогие участники конкурса, оставляйте свои впечатления от Creo Sketch прямо здесь, нам интересно ваше мнение!

Ну а какие футболки мы в итоге изготовили - об этом узнают участники форума в Москве! До встречи!

Приглашаем Вас на ежегодную конференцию PTCLive TechForum!

До форума осталось совсем немного времени. Новинки рынка САПР и PDM ожидают вас в стенах Центра Международной Торговли 17 мая. Не можете посвятить мероприятию весь день? Присоединяйтесь к онлайн трансляции — из дома, с рабочего места, любая сессия на выбор!

Приглашаем принять участие в мероприятии инженеров, конструкторов, технологов и других специалистов производства и конструкторских бюро, а также сотрудников и руководителей ИТ подразделений.

	Технические презентации.  Новый релиз революционной САПР Creo 2.0, обновления системы управления данными Windchill 10.1, дополнительные возможности системы анализа и управления качеством изделия и др.
	Истории заказчиков. Теория и практика, о которой говорят заказчики РТС: задачи, внедрение, результаты.
	Разнообразная программа.   Различные дополнительные сессии, технологические демо-зоны, розыгрыш призов, раздача триальных версий программных продуктов РТС и многое другое. Кому пробную версию Creo?
	TechForum TV.   PTCLive TechForum – это мероприятия для любого уголка России и СНГ. Конференция будет транслироваться в сети Интернет в режиме «он-лайн». Задавайте Ваши вопросы в прямом эфире, в чатах и в блоге. Регистрация обязательна!

А пока представляем видеоролик на одну из тем, о которой можно узнать на форуме - Свободное проектирование: 2D изображение, созданное в Creo Sketch, превращается.... превращается... в 3D модель с использованием возможностей свободного проектирования, предусмотренных в Сreo Parametric.

Over the years I have looked at a lot method server logs to try and determine root cause as to why the method server stopped.  The number one cause by far is a single long running operation overwhelming the available method server memory.  What that operation is often varies, but in general it's an operation that needs to 'touch' a lot of data, it could be a search, bill of materials operation, customized operation, a standard operation against a huge data set, something stuck in a loop you name it I've probably seen it.  The way the memory becomes overwhelmed also varies, the types of problems which are often bugs are a series of SQL statements each returning a 'bunch of data' that cumulatively overwhelms the memory the second type is when there is one SQL returns hundreds of thousands of results back to the method server which then overwhelms the memory.  QueryLimits are designed to prevent the second type but the first type is tougher to deal with because traditional tools generally don't deal with the method server stopping.  When it's a series of statements cumulatively leading to the memory being consumed we often enable SQL Logging in the  $WT_HOME\codebase\WEB-INF\log4jMethodServer.properties: like

• log4j.logger.wt.pom.sql=DEBUG
• log4j.logger.wt.pom.traceTiming=DEBUG
• log4j.logger.wt.pom.rowCount=TRACE

These settings will generate a very large MethodServer log file, use with caution.

Further details on why method servers crash can be found in the knowledge base article found here(authenticated).

The Windchill PTC System Monitor (PSM) is a relatively recently available tool available from PTC (for free) which gives an administrator unprecedented Windchill monitoring and performance diagnostic capability never available previously.  The intent of PSM is to :

• Increase visibility by administrators into the health of the system
• Reduce time to resolution of performance and other types of problems
• Reduce the time required for administrator to work on a problem with PTC Technical Support

It is highly recommended all customers install and use the PTC System Monitor.

The attached is a covers some of the highlights of PSM.

PSM can be downloaded from here.

A tool that is often used to diagnose performance problems, particularly when the problem is reproducible is the Windchill profiler.  The data in the output file will rule in or rule out a server side performance problem quickly, unfortunately though the output is cryptic and difficult to make sense of. 

I've just posted here(authenticated) a knowledge base article on how to understand the output.  

The presentation contains lots of details about understanding the output file, it may seem overwhelming.  A couple of things to keep in mind:

• The most common Windchill performance problem is one in which there are multiple round trips (hundreds or more) being made to the database.
  • To see if the profile contains any of these operations select #SQL #Count, and then upside down arrow to inverse the tree
  • Scan the SQL statements looking for high 'count' values, but only those without 'DB FETCH' immediately after them (this will be clearer when you read the presentation)
  • 'DB FETCH' results represents the rows returned from an operation
    • often it is normal activity but once the counts starting getting in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands often represent performance and scalability problems

• The second thing to do is to look for long running SQL statements
  • #SQL #COST and use the upside down arrow to invert if necessary so there is a list of SQL statements all starting with 'cost'
  • 'cost' is a time in ms i.e. cost=11568 is 11.568 seconds
  • 'cost' times under a second are not particularly reliable and shouldn't be depended on for accuracy
  • Look for SQL statements near the top like:
    • 'cost=11568:SELECT ....'
      • These are SQL statements which could be in need of tuning
  • Statements like 'cost=568:DB FETCH:SELECT ...' are the time it takes to return rows from the database to method server and unless the time is very high likely represent normal Windchill operations

The Windchill profiler is a powerful diagnostic tool and with practice it's often possible to tell quickly if there is a performance problem with a particular operation. 

With a customer community as large as PTC’s, you have an opportunity to view how your peers have solutions for those challenges you have been facing for months, maybe years

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Here is a view of sessions that you may find helpful:  

• Geometries that Delight – Exploring Advanced 3D Surface Creation
• Implementation of Creo 1.0/Windchill 10.0 – Administrators Talk
• "You're Doing What With Windchill?!" - Manufacturing Health Insurance Plans with Windchill and Arbortext

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