55 thoughts on “BO InfoView WebI Session Timeout = Developer’s Worst Enemy”

1. Hi Julian,

   I just thought I will add some more points. When we normally work with Infoview and Webi you will get two timeout Errors. The one you already explained above which is due to web server setting. The other one is Time out due to Webi Report Server. Even after we tweak the settings for the Web Server, if a webi report is idle for long time, we get time out again. We may wonder why we get a time out error again. In order to resolve the issue, either we can reset in CMC>Webi Report Server>Time out Parameter. We can increase the time in Minutes. Or we can even add a -RequestTimeout switch for Webi Report Server in CCM. Time should be in Milliseconds.

   Regards

   Aravind

2. I didn’t know as much as I do now about this topic. Thanks for clarifying those points. There is actually another, quite elusive timeout that is buried in the registry. This one is often the bottleneck of session timeouts in the Java Report Panel. I am planning to publish a new article and hopefully straighten this whole thing out, or try too.

   Thanks, Julian

3. Hi Julian,

   Its good to hear that you are going to come up with a refined document. Are you talking about tweaking following registry values.

   1) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager
   2) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Business Objects\Suite 11.5default\WebIntelligence\Server\Admin\SwapTimeOut

   We have tweaked the values in the above registry keys when we got the following error

   “The Web Intelligence Server Memory is full”

   Reason for the error is the following

   1. The error message occurs because the Web Intelligence server stresses the memory resources when processing many reports containing a large amount of data.
   2. This error message appears when the heap size is low

   Thanks and Regards

   Aravind

4. Yes! Now I am thinking that perhaps you should write the new article. 🙂
   Impressed, Julian

5. Good idea. If you would allow me:)

6. Hello, could you explain step by step the right settings to avoid these session problems,please ? because I’m having session timeout problems when I’m working with my BO WebI reports and I’m desperate.

7. Hi Erika,

   Can you please tell me exact symptoms of the Time Out. In fact there are more than one type of “time out Issue”.

   1) WebI report Time out – If you open your Webi Report long time untouched, you will get one time out error.
   2) Web Server Time out – When we keep Infoview Session idle, you will get another time out Error

   Thanks and Regards

   Aravind

8. Hi Julian,

   I have observed ‘Document Autosave and Recovery’ pop-up prompt displayed for any new user logged in to InfoView.
   It has disable option but this will disable the pop-up only if same user logs in next time.
   If one more new user logs in, the ‘Document Autosave and Recovery’ pop-up prompt is displayed again.

   Is there any setting which will disable this prompt for all or specific set of new users ?

   Regards,
   — Shivprasad M. Bhide

9. Sorry, I think you are referring to BO XI 3.1, right?

   I have not played around with it enough to find this yet. I will keep my ears open though. Please report back if you find something.

   Sorry, Julian

10. One more registry setting for Time-Out issue:

    This we use to follow when LiveOffice users get session timeout error when they are refreshing webi queries in Excel:

    Create a New Key in Registry in user’s system under the below path:

    HKEY_CURRENT_USER/SOFTWARE/BusinessObjects/Suite 11.7/ENTERPRISE

    New DWORD name : DefaultTimeOut
    and Value:example 1200(hexadecimal) this is in seconds..

    Any thoughts on this?

11. Hi Krishna,

    Is that a setting on the client machine or BO server machine?

    Thanks, Julian

12. Hi Julian,

    It is a setting on client machine. Even though we increase the time out value on server the client machine has its own setting. We use to set this on the client’s machine when they are getting time out error while refreshing a webi report via LiveOffice on client’s machine.

    Thanks,
    Krishna

13. Hi all,

    My users are exploring webi reports and they experience time-out after several minutes (less than 10 minutes). 2 users are ‘time-out’ nearly at the same time but not all.

    May I know whether there are any settings (any time-out related parameters) that affect this behaviour?

    Thanks

14. Hi David,

    As you can see from the article and the many invaluable contributions there are many different settings for timeout that can be adjusted. If different end users are reporting different timeout experiences I would do/research the following:

    • Check that this is true for all using the exact same report and universe
    • Make sure there are no report-level timeout limits set (done in the query editor)
    • You might try eliminating the user’s PC as the culprit by testing the behavior with a different user
    • What error does the user see during the timeout? This might be helpful.
    • Is the error encountered during work in the Java Report Panel, the interactive viewer, the HTML viewer, or all of the above?

    If the user’s PC is the issue then usually the problem would be with their local Java configuration (in my experience). Nevertheless, I have also seen the problem be between the chair and the keyboard in many cases. Perceptions are very curious and varied things.

15. Hi all,

    I further checked and found that my Web Intelligence processing server automatically recycles (restarts) in ten minumtes even the users are actively accessing the webi reports (causing the time-out). Anyone know whether there are any ways to bypass this problem (prevents the webi processing server from recycling)?

    (I checked the parameters of webi processing servers and they should not cause the servers to recycle in 10 mins)

    Thanks

16. If your WebI Processing Server is recycling itself than I think it has a problem. I have never heard of a configuration that automatically does this, but I have heard of BO Servers recycling themselves when they can’t connect to the CMS server(s) in the cluster.

    Check your event log and see if you have any application errors (Windows terminology, but I think Linux/Unix has something like this too). I suspect you will see something there confirming trouble, but not necessarily helping pinpoint the problem (don’t get your hopes up, speaking from experience).

17. I was looking for a solution to fix idle document timeout issue and I found this article quite interesting!

    Thanks for sharing a lot of information.

18. Hi Guys,
    I’m having an issue with a WebI report that is probably related to a timeout.
    What happens is the following:
    I refresh a report and in the meanwhile I’m monitoring the status of the query. The query ends correctly after some minutes but the WebI keeps on staying on Refreshing status (the popup with the loading bar is still there) forever. I always have to kill the refresh manually after a while and I don’t get the option of partial results neither.
    I changed the WebI report servers timeout and also the tomcat timeout without success unfortunately!

    Have you ever faced this issue? What could I change to make it working fine?

    Thanks in advance for your help.
    Best Regards,
    Luca

19. Hi Luca, can you try scheduling the report for refresh with the same parameters (if it has prompts) and then check to see how long it takes. Also make sure you can open the refreshed WebI instance and that it looks like you expect.

20. Hi,
    We’re migrating from BO XIr2 to 3.1. In our r2 environment, we had the RequestTimeout parameter set on the Webi services and we made the registry changes listed in the above comments (Windows key in Subsystems, SwapTimeOut, etc.). I’d like to know if these settings are all still necessary in 3.1. Thanks!

21. Just ran into this, thought it would be helpful to post a link back to my post that talks about auto save feature in Web Intelligence XI 3.1

    http://shahfaisalmuhammed.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/auto-save-feature-in-web-intelligence/

22. Hi Cecelia, I believe that these settings are still required to obtain the desired result, but I am not 100% certain.

23. Hi,

    You mentioned there are 3 places we must increase the session timeout, but you didn’t specify exactly where. Can you advise where the locations are? I’m using BO XI3.1. I’m having trouble with Infoview hanging or timing out after few minutes of refreshing a report.

24. Hi,
    I have a peculiar prblem.
    I have application environment where users from front end JSP pages(JBoss server) hit boxi R2 envioronment.
    Here is the scenario
    1) Open user sessions in CMC are 5
    2) If I see the WEBI Report server current Requests are far more than the number of session. I think users can not open more than one report from webi. From application(JSP)side also developers are saying they can not run multiple report at a time.
    Why there are more number of requests showing in webi servers more than the sessions ?
    Help is appreciated

25. WebI Report Servers receive requests from WebI Job Servers and also from client Java Report Panels, so don’t forget about scheduled reports of any origin. From InfoView it is possible to open multiple reports, this is a simple preferences change. Also, I think client Java Report Panel sessions might actually result in two requests on a WebI Report Server. A long-running report could be closed by a user before it finishes and the user could open a new report, this would result in multiple requests initiated by the user. Finally, BO has some bugs and sometimes it does not close sessions after they complete. You could be suffering from this issue.

26. Hi Julian,

    Any chance you have completed an updated article with a few more details on which files/settings to change and where they are?

    I am mostly interested in the settings for Web Intelligence report designing running on the TomCat web server.

    Thanks,

    Frits

27. Not yet, unfortunately. However, I have been feeling the need to sort this out and you have now pushed this to the top of the pile (after my little break after finishing my major update of the Query Builder / SDK Query Language guide). 🙂

28. have observed the following with our 3 Webi Servers.
    Even when there are no requests to the Webi servers(no users and no
    scheduled documents) the processes are showng memory usage as 0.8GB,
    0.9GB and 1.2 GB on the windows task manager.

    We have the following setting on each Webiserver

    AMaximum Simultaneous Connections 50

    Connection Time Out 20 minutes

    List of Values Batch Size 1000

    Maximum Size of List of Values for Custom Sorting 1000

    Universe Cache Size 20 universes

    List of Values Caching Enable

    Enable Viewing Caching Enable

    Enable Real Time Caching Enable

    Document Cache Duration minutes 4320

    Document Cache Size 1048576 KBytes

    Amount of Cache To Keep When Document Cache Is Full 70 %

    Document Cache Scan Interval 120 minutes

    Maximum Number Of Downloaded Documents To Cache 0

    Maximum Binary File Size 200 MBytes

    Maximum Character File Size 250 MBytes

    Is any one of the above setting cause the memory usage more even the
    real usage from Users,Scheduling is not at all there. Please let me
    know.Why the memory usage is not coming down even there are no activity
    on these servers.

    Your help is really appreciated

29. WebI Processing Servers like all servers are constantly communicating with the CMS. They are also be caching popular reports and objects; they do this in memory. I would be most concerned about constant CPU usage and not memory usage. How is that doing?

30. Julian,
    How the memory will be released from these webi process on System servers. Is there any thing we have to do from BO side ? Memoury usage is increasing day by day and the one of the webi server is raching 2gb limit and is not responding to the requests any more. How do we release the memory from this is my concern

    Satya

31. Hi satya, the best immediate solution is just to restart the server. The cleanest method is to do so in CMC. What you describe sounds like a problem, it should not behave like that. I have heard of runaway reports that can do this, but I never actually saw one. You might need to observe again and look to your auditing data to see if you can pinpoint a culprit.

32. Julian,
    I don’t have auditing data and I am unable to put the traces because of the cost of the system resources. I have 2 webi servers on 4 Quad(16 CPU) windows standard server edition. I have seen only max 30 concurrent active users on the system very rare even. But they run heavy reports. Do you suggest more webi servers within 4GB of Ram since I can not increase the memory more than 4gb since the Windows standard server supports upto 4gb only though my Hardware HP proliant server supports upto 64 gb since it is 16 core unit. Or you suggest windows server upgrade to a enterprise edition

    Satya

33. You can enable auditing and limit it to just the event of “Document Refresh”. This can be done without real downtime and give you something to look at quickly. I recommend it. Auditing won’t add hardly any overhead, nothing like those terrible traces.

    I think a server upgrade would be a cheaper upgrade accompanied with RAM; however, if you have runaway reports you might be futilely just raising the ceiling on an infinitely tall problem. Monster reports can really only be controlled by setting standards. Sometimes they may even be corrupt as well. You really need to pinpoint the root cause.

34. I agree with Julian. We spent about a year trying to tweak Webi services and Tomcat before we finally got users and leadership to accept that huge reports were the real problem. BO is not an ETL tool and Webi report services just do not perform well once they begin to consume more than 1.5 GB of CPU. We have 16 Webi report services running with only up to about 200 concurrent users but still have problems with specific reports. We finally set some limits on universes and when reports time out because of those limits, we force users to come up with an alternate solution (materialized views, database indexes, changes to universe, etc.). The 64 bit Windows memory advantage is misleading because BO for Windows is still a 32 bit application. I think 32 bit apps are still bound by the 2 GB per process limit.

35. Excellent points Cecelia, I honestly could not have made them any better. Thank you for sharing with us.

36. I’ve seen a few posts about freezing. We were getting this when editing webI reports and is related to using the Proper JRE version. For us on XIR2 SP2, we had to use JRE 1.5_06 and when we went to XIR2 SP5.2, we had to update to JRE 1.6_xx because the 1.5 version was freezing. In most cases, the report had prompts.

37. you can do one more thing for connection timeout….

    go to windows registry on the BOBJ server here
    Code:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Business Objects\Suite 11.5\CER

    and change the ConnectionTimout value to 3600000 in place of 600000

38. HELP!! We’re trying to get CC&B to publish reports to our BOE server. We get the error message “Sever error encountered accessing reporting server” (body of the message: The report request failed because of a server error while accessing the report server. Report Options may not be set properly. System administrators should review the system logs for further information.)

    Can you steer me into the right direction for resolving this communication glitch? Do you think it might be timing out like you suggest above?

    Thank you!

39. I am unfamiliar with CC&B, but I doubt that the WebI Java Panel timeout has anything to do with your issues. The only way that a 3rd party application could publish reports to BOE is through the SDK. Assuming the code in the BOE SDK application is good and is compatible with your version of BOE, then all that is left is to check that the application is successfully connecting to the CMS. You really need to look at those logs (on the application side, CC&B) and see what specific errors are given there.

40. We are on BOE XI 3.1 and had significant prob with Webi reports eceeding the 2G limit and freezing. We were only able to manage it by having a .bat that killed each webi report process each night prior to scheduled reports began. When we upgraded to SP2/FP2.4 the WebI server subsided and the normal recycling functionality now appears to work as advertised.

    Also, SAP BW integration was an issue. BW 7.0 was returning HUGE files to BO for reporting, sometimes singlehandedly pushing a Webi processor over the top. Installation of the BW enhancement pack 1 greatly reduced the size of these files ( to about 15% of there prior size).

41. On the timeout issue, (BOE XI 3.1) I set the time outs for web.xml in Tomcat/webapps/InfoviewApp, ../InfoviewAppActions, ../AnalyticalReporting all of which helped. Also set the registry setting SwapTimeOut to 50 minutes each. No more timeouts for developers or consumers.

    One possible side effect – Tomcat.exe now accumulating excessing memory in Task Manager, causing Tomcat to become unresponsive at aroun 1.3G. Don’t know if this is related to abve changes or not, but suspicious.

    Anyone with ideas?

42. We are using XI 3.1 amd we had the Webi timeout issue and we recently fixed the issue by doing the following changes on BO server.

    1.
    1) Go to Central Management Console (CMC)
    2) Servers –> WebIntelligenceProcessingServer –> Properties
    3) Set “Idle Document Timeout” to 3600 sec

    2..Input File server
    Navigate to CMC->Servers->Input File Repository Server.
    Modify the Maximum Idle Time to “120”.

    3.. Tomcat
    (a)
    1) Go to \\Business Objects\tomcat55\webapps\PlatformServices\ WEB-INF
    2) Open web.xml
    3) Search “session-timeout” keyword in this file.
    4) Increase the timeout value to 60.
    5) Save web.xml
    (b)
    Navigate to BusinessObjects installation directory, ..\Program Files\Business Objects\Tomcat\conf\
    Take the backup of the server.xml file.
    Edit the server.xml file with a notepad Search for the line that says “Connector on port 8080” In this section modify connectionTimeout=”20000″ to connectionTimeout=”40000″.

    4. Java timeout:
    Launch control pane.
    In control panel double click on java.
    when the java control panel comes up, select the java tab
    Under java applet runtime settings click on the view button (should bring up the java runtime settings)
    Type -xms128m -xmx164m into the java runtime parameter
    click ok

    5. Swap Timeout:
    Navigate to Start->Run on the server.
    Type “regedit”.
    Navigate to the below path:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\BusinessObjects\Suite12.0\default\WebIntelligence\Server\Admin\
    Select the key “SwapTimeOut”
    Then select decimal and set it to 3600000.

    6.In Registry set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Business Objects\Suite 12.0\CMS\Instances\cmsname.cms,
    set IdleSessionTimeout=14400000

    7. IE timeout: (this step is optional)
    On the client machine where you run the report.
    Click Start->Run.
    Type “regedit”and then click OK.
    Locate the path: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\InternetSettings .
    Add a ‘ReceiveTimeout’ DWORD value with a data value of ()*1000.
    For example, if you want the timeout duration to be two hours, set the ReceiveTimeout data value to 7200000 (*1000).

    8. Check the universe timeouts in File-> parameters->”Controls”.
    “Limit execution time” and “limit number of rows”.

    9. Check the option “Disconnect after each transaction” for the universe connectivity.

    NOTE:
    ———-
    Please take the back up of every file before modifying it.

    Good luck!

43. Hi, thanks for this blog.. we encountered the same timeout errors (both).. It will help us a lot.. Especially in our month end reports..

44. So in regards to 3.1, how have the timeout issues improved over previous versions, if at all. Are the suggested increases also the same on 3.1?

45. The “auto-save” feature in WebI is a big improvement in my opinion. It really does remove most of a important consequences of session timeout. However, the underlying issues remain unchanged in my opinion.

46. Does anybody implemented Gwen’s recommendation ?
    Anybody has this issue resolved completely ?
    I am on XI 3.1 and looking for the resolution for this issue.
    Thanks

47. Every since I implemented the changes I haven’t had any problem at all.
    Thanks.

48. Hi Gwen,

    Want to know whether it will work for BO XI R2. We are facing the same problem.

    Regards,
    suthi.

49. Hi Suthi,

    I am not sure if the fix will work for BO XI R2. What you can do is make a copy of all the files and registry you are going to change and get a screen shot of all the parameters you will touch in CMC. Then you can apply the changes to see if it fixes your time out problem. If not, then reverse all the changes. If it does fix the problem, that would be great.

    Thanks,
    Gwen

50. Hi Gwen,

    Thanks for your reply.