Windchill and Creo over a VPN connection

Is this a persistent or intermittent failure?  If it is intermittent, confirm your Apache Keep Alive Timeout value is 60 seconds.  This can be confirmed from any client computer.  Just replace the red text with your Windchill server’s URL.  Then run from a PowerShell shell.

try {

    $r = wget -Uri https://ptc-training.ptc.com/Windchill/wt.properties

} catch {

    $r = $_.Exception

}

$r.Headers

If it is 15 seconds (OOTB default value), then it was never set.  The following will set it.

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS72843

If it is something greater than 60 seconds, it needs to be reduced to 60 seconds.

Note: You can also turn on Apache debugging.  Edit: 

%wt_home%\..\HTTPServer\config\httpd.conf

set

LogLevel debug

If making configuration changes to Apache, confirm they are valid before restarting Apache

%wt_home%\..\HTTPServer\bin\httpd -t

Restart Apache

Was Creo reconfigured for a WAN connection?  Specifically, was dm_http_compression_level evaluated?

https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article/CS153887

Note: In the past, when changing dm_http_compression_level, the server must be unregistered, Creo Parametric restarted, and the server re-registered for setting to take effect.  Not sure if this is still required today.

Does your IT department use WAN accelerators? If so, don't enable compression. Compression and WAN accelerators don't mix well.

Is Windchill configured for HTTP (port 80) or HTTPS (port 443)? The protocol in use requires the associated port to be open thru all firewalls and anti-virus solutions sitting between the Windchill application server and the clients. That includes client, network and VPN firewalls.  I'm assuming the appropriate port is open or you wouldn't get to the point of downloading or uploading.

Do you know your network map when connecting from home? Home may only be 5 physical miles from the office, but some companies run all VPN connections thru a central hub far away from their Windchill servers -- potentially in another state or country.  The added distance and network hops can impact performance.

If the first couple of ideas don't help, log a call with PTC and be prepared to involve your IT department based on PTC's investigation.  PTC isn't responsible for fixing the issue but they should be able to help you tell IT where to look for the network configuration issue.

Hi Marc,

in addition to the various settings suggested by the other Marc, to the people working from home I gave a couple of suggestions.

The first one was to load all the data in the Windchill cache, recreate it and download only the data they should have been working on from home, this of course before they stayed at home.

In our case we also had a centralized installation on a network disk, which we already knew didn't perform well in VPN, so we copied the installation locally to all the machines, also modifying the boot script so that it would point to the local copy instead of the network copy.

Despite this, Creo's boot times are two to three times longer than before.

The final tip, since we have about 200 people from the various offices working from home, is to run the WS operations outside standard working hours (for example, early in the morning or late afternoon, or take advantage of the lunch or dinner break).

At the moment, after a couple of weeks of working in this mode, even after analyzing the session data sent with Performance Advisor for Creo, there were no obvious problems in users' work.