Cognos 10.2 BI very slow

[kvangor27]

Hi,

I'm very new to Cognos and have been using Business Objects for the past 10 years.  Our company is moving to the Cognos 10.2 BI and an IBM consultant just installed our development environment last week.  I know very little about the backend and how it works, so I apologize in advance for asking any dumb questions.
First off, our development server has 8 CPUs and 44 GB of RAM (yes, 44 GB!!), yet navigating within the Admin tool, Report Studio and other areas (running basic reports against samples) seems very slow. 
Is there anything I can check in the configurations or anywhere else to make sure the environment is set up correctly?

Thanks in advance for any help!
Kevin

[CognosPaul]

How slow is slow? Report Studio always takes a few moments to load, but that's more of a limitation of the client computer than that of the server. Depending on the number of users you have, and if this is a new dev environment I'm guessing you don't have many, I would expect the admin page to load within a few seconds. The sample reports vary in expected run time depending on the data source and complexity. But I don't think any of them should take more than 10 seconds.

Off the top of my head, here are the following questions I would ask to begin pinpointing server performance issues (by no means is this a complete list):
How many users? What type of server is this? Is is a virtual machine? Is this a dedicated Cognos server? Is this a clustered or a single server install? 64 or 32 bit? How fast is the network? Are there any communication problems between the server and the db server? If you run 30 reports simultaneously, how many bibus processes are generated? What type of database is the Cognos content store installed on? Is the admin page as slow to learn when run from the server as on the client? Are there any exceptions being thrown in the cognosserver.log? Does the cognosserver.log show anything weird, like thousands of identical rows? Do you have auditing enabled, and at what level? What type of security? Are any of the advanced tuning settings set in the dispatcher? Are you accessing Cognos through a LAN or via the internet?

[captainkarisma]

Kevin,  check the dispatcher log settings and make sure that none of the logging service levels are higher than BASIC, as anything higher than that will really slow the system down.

[kvangor27]

Thank you both for your suggestions!  All the dispatcher log settings are set to Basic.

The problem may be the fact that my boss was logged in through the VPN.  I used the tools all day yesterday with no significant delays.  I'm going to check with him again this morning.

We do have another issue though that's very unusual.  The IBM guy added me under the System Administrators group.  I added another user under the same group and that person doesn't have unlimited access to all the applications (Report Studio, etc) like I do.  The user did initially, but the next time he logged on he was back to the basics.

Does that make any sense?
Kevin

[CognosPaul]

It is very likely that the VPN connection is to blame. There is usually quite a bit of back and forth between the client and server when working with Cognos. There may be ways to optimize things for users that need to log in remotely, but I'm afraid that's a bit beyond me.

System administrators usually have access to everything. Is it possible someone removed the user from the sys admin? Is this user part of any groups that have the studios set to deny? Has anyone modified the default roles?

[blom0344]

We do have another issue though that's very unusual.  The IBM guy added me under the System Administrators group.  I added another user under the same group and that person doesn't have unlimited access to all the applications (Report Studio, etc) like I do.  The user did initially, but the next time he logged on he was back to the basics.

Let the user create/renew his/her credentials (preferences --> personal tab) and check whether he/she is still well authorized

[kvangor27]

Thank you.

He was using Chrome which I found out isn't compatible.  If he uses IE all applications are available.

Thanks again for all your help and suggestions!!
Kevin

[dmusson17]

Hi Kevin,

I'm curious as to how your 10.2 install has been performing since these posts.  We have recently set up an Express 10.2.1 install with the dispatcher on a windows virtual machine and the gateway on a physical machine in the dmz.  Performance has been rough to say the least, from navigating AD to apply security to running landing pages that have multiple queries on them, things are just slow.  Just curious how you were faring.

D