TM1 Forum

I was just wondering if there have been any new developments in the recent new releases that eases the pain of accessing TM1, in Excel, over a WAN. Alternately, does the new web interface for TM1 work any better than before?

We are currently on version 9.4 MR1 HF3, and are waiting for a non-lethal upgrade to jump to.

Thanks!!!

There's some old news....
Citrix or similar is the best (some would say the only) way to use TM1 over a Wan.

TM1 Performance over a WAN has always been something of a hurdle - to some extent performance using TM1 perspectives/cube viewer has been improved in between earlier versions and version 9.4 However, the TM1/Excel client and in particular some TM1/Excel functions are extrememly 'chatty' between client/server which is why there are latency issues when client/server operate across a WAN.

I don't think any great strides have been made yet, but I understand it is quite a big deal for Cognos/IBM to sort out for themselves, as IBM refuse to use Citrix as a matter of corporate policy, so if they are to use TM1 over their own WAN they have to sort out the chatiness of the protocols.

Martin

I remember investigating some time ago the concept of changing the size of the packets being sent from the server (this is a Windows server setting and not specific to TM1)- hearsay was that tweaking this could in some instances help circumvent the latency problem across a WAN. Had a network engineer investigating with me and no matter what we tried we witnessed no difference in performance.

Thanks folks for the info: Here's some figures

With an active form based on DBRW response went from 8 secs to 76 secs when we went from Lan 10MB/sec to Wan 1MB/sec.

Now what is frightening is that the whole xls to download is 250k whereas the amount of traffic suggested by this data 80MB which is 320 x what it would cost to build the file on the server and send it.

When we talk about 'chatty protocols' would it be safe to say that TM1 has verbal diahorrea or am I missing something?

John

Its not the bandwidth that is the critical factor but the latency. Do you have any stats for ping response time before and after this change as I am willing to bet that's your issue.

“chatty protocol” means tm1 sends lots of messages btw client and server (as opposed to fewer messages with more contextual data encoded in the headers. Number of messages x latency = poor response time.

Hi Lotsaram

Thanks for your response

I think you are right in that it seems to be the 1000*(send/reply) protocol that TM1 uses vs the (1000*send/1000*reply) Web based stuff tends to use.

The latencies are LAN <1ms and WAN approx 25ms.

Interestingly I tried to use TM1 Web with Websheets, thinking that it might behave better, but the problem was even worse. I could not even get the active form based websheets working on the LAN version with a decent response!

The other thing I found was that the TM1 Web based cube browser seemed to work absolutely fine over the WAN, but any active form based stuff just gave up and died.

Any info on this would be appreciated - I got a message saying that the active form sheet could not be converted to XML on some of the sheets so I figured that the sheet would be converted and sent in one go and thus avoid the chatty protocol.

Hi John - yes 9.4 and above there were improvements in WAN peformance within Cube Viewers in TM1. Unforutnately this doesn't cover the Excel Reporting side (active forms, standand TM1/Excel function calls).

In my experience - ping times less than 10ms are likely to be acceptable for TM1/Excel reports though to some extent this does depend on how large/complex your Excel templates are.