Out of the box Windchill install, publisher queues filling up, add more Worker Agents ?

[carnold-3]

The business I work at runs an 'out of the box' Windchill 10.1 M050 installation, with Creo as its CAD application, and I've recently been given the task of improving it's performance. One thing I'm noticing is that the Publisher queues get fuller as the week progresses and don't get down to zero (or close to it) until the week has ended (we have no design engineers working over the weekend).

For example right now, lunch time on a Friday, the L queue has 2,422 entries and just under 2,000 each in PublisherQueue1 and 2.

We split our Windchill installation over two Windows 2008 R2 servers, which I believe is due to some historic uncertainty over Oracle licensing, and as of a few months ago both of these servers are now virtual machines in a VMware cluster. Both of these virtual machines / servers never break into a sweat (CPU / storage / Network), however the queues just fill up and up.

From what little I understand (I've supported many CAD system over the years in my IT career but never Windchill until now) is what's processing the entries in the queue a 'Worker Agent' ?. We currently have just one of these, and if it is the agent can addtional ones be added to service PublisherQueue1 and 2 ? (we have the performance capacity for it).

Thanks.

[James62]

The Worker is simply a non-graphic Creo Parametric with a ProE_FoundationVis licence that is supposed to run on the server and do all the publish and visualization jobs your Windchill may require.

It seems like you only have a single Worker set up but two PublisherQueues allowed, which makes it not balanced in case the worker can't keep up with both queues before timeouts some entries in one or the other queue fail to process. Have a look at WVS Job Monitor for noneventfailed jobs.

On our setup we run two Workers and have 3 PublisherQueues. For a single Worker PTC recommends to have only 1 PublisherQueue.

I find this whole publishing mechanism for Windchill pretty specific and i guess this is not something you will see elsewhere. If you can get a training for it then i recommend doing that first.

[carnold-3]

Thanks James, really helpful.