Slow pdf and Excel reports

[terry_stjean]

I have a report created in Report Studio.
It is pretty simply. Nothing conditional.
It uses 1 query. When I run the SQL used by this query, it runs in seconds.
When I run the report as HTML, it returns about 80 pages and I can navigate through the pages in about 15 minutes.
When I run the report as pdf or excel, it runs for 1 1/2 hours and then dies. I get a very generic error message. On a smaller report, I get the pdf or excel file, but it runs for a loooong time.
I have talked to Cognos tech support but we haven't been able to resolve this issue.

I have read all messages others have had which might be related and tried the suggestions but still nothing has worked.
So, specifically for those that had an issue with slow pdf or Excel reports, what did you do to resolve the issue.

[larsonr]

We checked the query.  We had some reports that were taking 10 minutes to run that ran in Crystal in 30 seconds.  By looking at the sql generated we were able to optimize it against oracle for execution.

If you have already believe to have found your query optimized please try some of the following ....

Check the section in the Configuration guide on setting the PDFs on rendering speed (this is after all the data has been acquired or to start piecing it together as it becomes available to minimize screen rendering time).

Change your default font in Cognos Configuration to something like Arial instead of Andale.

Are you loading any images in the report?

Are you using Adobe versions 5.5 through 7.0 for a PDF reader.  8.0 has some issues that have not been worked out and the official word from Cognos is they aren't ready yet.

Last -- How is the application server doing?  What is its performance like when trying to execute the query?

[terry_stjean]

The query takes seconds to execute.
The default font was changed.
I've looked at the manual. but no help.
No graphics.
Using Acrobat 8. Will look at changing to 7. But we have the same issue creating Excel reports.
We shut off the antivirus, but no change.
We are looking at anything in the firewall set up that may be causing issues.

[COGNOiSe administrator]

How does your local storage look like? RAID1?

[terry_stjean]

On both the SQL Server machine and the Cognos 8 server, drive C is a blade server and drive E is a partition on a SAN.

[COGNOiSe administrator]

How many HBAs do you have for then SAN? What is the link speed? Is the E drive stripped or mirrored inside the SAN?

[biejorrun]

I'm experiencing the same problem here.

I have a query, which queries one database table with 20000 rows, 21 columns. No joins, no complex query structures in Cognos, no images, no conditional formatting, just a simple list. On my server, Cognos 8.2 is installed, as well as the table I'm querieng (SQL 2000 SP4). It's a box with 4 quadcores (16x Xeon 3.0 GHz) and 16GB of memory. All disks are not in a RAID construct, they are configured as seperate volumes. 1 disk = 1 volume.

When I generate as HTML, it takes 2 seconds, and "nothing" happens on the server. When I try to run as Excel 2000 or PDF, it takes centuries, and CPU utilization goes to 30%, memory to 5-6 GB. This also happens when we generate the report to a report view, not even opening the files.

If anyone has a solution or a clue, please post! Me and my users are desperate for a solution...

[CogFanGal]

I am very late to this party, but I found a solution for my report.  I have some semi-complex prompt queries, along with a few other queries that are stepped through.  HTML is very fast, but PDF and Excel took forever (for a 2 page report).

For all queries, change these properties:
Use Local Cache = YES
Execution Method = Concurrent

I hope this helps others.  I generally set those properties on all queries in every report I work on, it always seems to speed things up.