Cognos freeze when trying to add members

[Sunchaser]

Hi all,

Well, the scenario is quite simple, I try to describe:
. Accessing the Cognos administration page as a "admin", then clicking on the "security" tab
. Then I choose "Cognos", and navigate in order to reach the "Set properties - Consumers" page
. Here I have the tab "Members", that I want to access to in order to add new members
-> When I click on this tab, then the page is "freezing" and it takes a looot of time to be displayed; so adding new members is really, really difficult. You can click on the tab, and then go away from the office to take a coffee for example ...  instead of waiting in front of the screen. But it is not the way I want the things to be.
So, in this environment, we only have 100 hundred consumers. (I don't think it is "so much" to display)
In general, in this environment, we don't have any performance problem (for the reports, dashboard, etc). Every thing is normal, except this one.

Does anybody knows where the problem could be ?

Thanks !
Kind regards
V.

[MFGF]

Hi all,

Well, the scenario is quite simple, I try to describe:
. Accessing the Cognos administration page as a "admin", then clicking on the "security" tab
. Then I choose "Cognos", and navigate in order to reach the "Set properties - Consumers" page
. Here I have the tab "Members", that I want to access to in order to add new members
-> When I click on this tab, then the page is "freezing" and it takes a looot of time to be displayed; so adding new members is really, really difficult. You can click on the tab, and then go away from the office to take a coffee for example ...  instead of waiting in front of the screen. But it is not the way I want the things to be.
So, in this environment, we only have 100 hundred consumers. (I don't think it is "so much" to display)
In general, in this environment, we don't have any performance problem (for the reports, dashboard, etc). Every thing is normal, except this one.

Does anybody knows where the problem could be ?

Thanks !
Kind regards
V.

Hi,

Have you ruled out a browser issue?

Cheers!

MF.

[Sunchaser]

Hi,
The problem with the browser issue is that I've seen the behavior on several environment / an different browsers: IE, Firefox, Chrome.
I guess that if it was a frequent problem, I would find already topics and answers about this kind of problem...
I don't know what Cognos really does at this point in time - when clicking on this tab, "Members".
Is there a "query" to the Active Directory ?
Could this be the problem ?
I tried to check through Chrome "developer tools" what was happening with the page at this moment.
It appears that, for a small size of data transferred - 28.8kb, not so big, correct ? - the "Waiting" time (Time to first bit) is 54.24s.
Chrome says, about this "time to first byte":

Time spent waiting for the initial response, also known as the Time To First Byte. This time captures the latency of a round trip to the server in addition to the time spent waiting for the server to deliver the response.

So, I would tend to think actually that the problem is around this point..

Any advice / help about this is still welcome
;)

KR,
V.

[bdbits]

It sounds to me like your authentication provider (e.g. Active Directory) has a performance issue. When you get to the point where you are waiting, yes Cognos is querying Active Directory to get the list for you to choose from.

My first thought would be to visit with whoever manages your Active Directory and/or domain controllers.

[Sunchaser]

Hi bdbits,

Yes, thanks, I think I'll try to go this way, even if it is not going to be so easy for "internal reason". Dealing with people is sometimes harder than solving problems on computer ..  ;)

One more question from my side, after sometimes I have read on the net:
. Some guy was having troubles on his Cognos installation, but at the time any user was trying to authenticate. Very slow performance.
It seems that the problem was related to the configuration set in Cognos for the Security / Authentication / "his ldap" .. there are particular values to put in "Base Distinguish Name", or "Folder mapping / Name", or "Group Mapping / Name", etc,etc. The values he has entered were not 100% correct (at least, this was the answer given), and was causing the slow performance.
Could it be the same here ?

Thanks,
KR,
V.

[bdbits]

It could be. The answer kind of depends on how your AD is set up and where the user accounts are located. It could be the AD query is looking through a lot more objects in AD than are necessary. Your AD guy could probably help you with that, too. ;-)

[sunosoft]

Hi all,

Well, the scenario is quite simple, I try to describe:
. Accessing the Cognos administration page as a "admin", then clicking on the "security" tab
. Then I choose "Cognos", and navigate in order to reach the "Set properties - Consumers" page
. Here I have the tab "Members", that I want to access to in order to add new members
-> When I click on this tab, then the page is "freezing" and it takes a looot of time to be displayed; so adding new members is really, really difficult. You can click on the tab, and then go away from the office to take a coffee for example ...  instead of waiting in front of the screen. But it is not the way I want the things to be.
So, in this environment, we only have 100 hundred consumers. (I don't think it is "so much" to display)
In general, in this environment, we don't have any performance problem (for the reports, dashboard, etc). Every thing is normal, except this one.

Does anybody knows where the problem could be ?

Few days back I also suddenly faced the similar issue. Everything was fine at Cognos, AD level. I was not getting any clue how to resolve it. So thought final option to try with restarting Cognos services. And yeah...it resolved the issue.

[Sunchaser]

Hi all,

Few words just to say that the problem is not completely solved but has been postponed due to other problems / tasks more urgent.
A weekly restart of the Cognos service was in place in the previous environment (date & time were ok for users ), and we asked to get the same in the new one. But it is not depending only on me, else it would have been already set-up.
Well, I'm not sure it could solve 100% of the things, but at least it's not lost.
If the problem is reported to me again in the future, I'll go for bdbits advice, and try to contact the AD guy. Could be interesting. If it appears then that something was to be changed, I'll post here the old "incorrect" configuration and the one recommended.
I can't really push in order to continue on this topic, as some more important things are requested. So, it is on hold, if I can say.

Have a merry Christmas all !
;)