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Improving export to Excel performance

Former Member
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Does anyone have any tips on improving excel performance when exporting a webi report? I don't want to get into discussions on why users are trying to export larger files (in excess of 6MB); I am just looking for suggestions.

When a user runs the export, not only does it take a long time, but there is simply no notification that the export is even processing or if it stopped, etc.

In previous tools, the user could run the same query and it would run and export very quickly, but in BO it could take upwards of 10min or [much] more.

Any ideas? We are on BO 4.0 SP 7 Patch 7 currently, with a planned upgrade to BO 4.1 SP4 over the summer.  Maybe this is no longer an issue with 4.1?

Thanks,

Missy

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

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Hi all,

I want to clear up some confusion here since this thread has been ongoing for awhile.

I was involved with the initial defect tracked under Note 1994745. I can verify with the fix in place, it does improve performance quite a bit when exporting Webi to Excel.

Note the fix was created based on a sampling of reports we recieved from customers while investigating. It may not address all report design scenarios, so the fix may work in some instances, but not others. I do not know exactly what designs this fix will work for, and what will not unfortunately. It is also not tested when adding compression on the appserver, so I do not know how the fix will act there.

It is also important to note that the fix for Note 1994745 is included in the following or newer BI 4.1 Patch levels:

Support Pack 02 Patch 10
Support Pack 03 Patch 6
Support Pack 04 Patch 7
Support Pack 05 Patch 3
Support Pack 06

If you are on a release older than this, I recommend you patch up when possible and re-check the performance.

If you do upgrade and stlil see performance differences when compared to XI 3.1, please log an incident with support so we can investigate further and engage Development where needed. It will also help the investigation greatly if you could attach sample reports with saved data to the incident that we can test with. It may not always be possible to bring the performance back in line with XI 3.1 due to the differences between the versions, but we can work on closing the gap as much as possible.

Thanks!

Mike

Former Member
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Hi Mike,


Thanks for your response and the details.  I just wanted to note that when I made this original post, it was not based on comparisons with XI 3.1, since our group first started on BO 4.0.  We had users used to other products that produced exports within a minute or two, moving to this new product now that was taking much, much longer.  Not a happy transition despite all the other benefits BO was going to be offering them.

I don't want to speak for everyone, but at least from my/our end, I think the issue was further frustrated by the fact that SAP support did not appear to acknowledge that there was an actual issue/problem/difference/whatever, so it was a relief to not only see others in the same boat, but finally SAP notes referencing potential solutions.

We are only just testing SP5 Patch 4 right now, but so far our testers are 'enjoying' the improved performance, so I imagine our users will be happier now as well.

Thanks,

Missy

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Sorry for the confusion. The original issue that resulted in the fix / Note 1994745 was a scenario where performance was much different in BI 4.1 than it was in XI 3.1.

The fix will also address performance when compared to 4.0 or early releases of 4.1.


I am happy your users are seeing an improvement!

Mike

former_member280203
Participant
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Hi Mike,

we have updated the BI4.1 sp4 patch3 to patch 11 to improove the excel export performance,but we did't see any improvement in excel export performance.when the scheduled output is in webi format it takes just 60 secs ,but excel output taking almost 10mins in 4.1.

is there any other parameters needs to changed in BI 4.1 server configuration.

Regards,

Divi.

Former Member
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Hi!

We are on 4.1 SP6 patch 5 --> performance for exporting to excel for 300k rows is poor.

It takes about 25-30min...

OS: AIX 7.1

RAM: 75GB

CPU: Power 7+

😕

Tom

and just for info...

your kba 2008223 is not released for "normal" people, maybe only for sap internal use...

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Hi Tom,

It appears your current issue may be due to the problem logged under Note 2321158 - Slow performance is experienced when exporting Web Intelligence documents to Excel.

It is currently under Development investigation and any fix will be included in an upcoming SP06, SP07 and SP08 Patch release on 4.1, as well as Patch releases for BI 4.2 SP02 and SP03.

The Note should be updated with the exact release information when it is known.

I hope this helps!

Mike

Former Member
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Hi Mike!

Thanks for the information. I am wondering why the takes so lóng to fix a bug which worked in further releases...

An there many other things for example the BEXQuery but that is another topic

tom

Answers (9)

Answers (9)

MinoriOno
Advisor
Advisor
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Hi All,

My customer has the same issue on BI 4.2 SP02 patch3.

She raised an incident and got the answer, saying It is as designed from SAP support.

The customer posted a request to Idea Place.

https://ideas.sap.com/D35540

If you are facing the same issue, checking and voting the post would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Minori

Former Member
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Hello,

Currently we're using SAP BO 4.0 SP6 and we have the same issue, when try to export a biggest report (10 MB) we need to wait about 5 / 10 minutes to take it.

I read the entire topic and if I understand still there is no a solution for next version, BO 4.1...

We'll create a ticket to SAP and wait for some luck

Thank you.

Pedro Amaro

Former Member
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Hi Pedro,

As far as I am aware there is still no solution in 4.1... keep us posted on what you find out with submitting your incident.

We are currently on 4.1 SP4 Patch 1, starting to plan for an upgrade to either Patch 8 on SP4 or SP5 Patch 4.... I am hoping we can move to SP5 and pick up some other fixes we've been waiting for, though none relate to export to excel performance.

Good Luck!

-Missy

Former Member
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Hi

We have recently upgraded from 4.1 SP3 to SP5 Patch 2.

And since the company still in on Java 6, we had to force all the users to HTML.

After the switch to HTML we have had a lot of complains form the users about Excel performance.

Sometimes they are able to save to Excel, and sometimes not.

We are not able to find a pattern.

When using applet with Crome or firefox we are able to save to Excel.

Regards

Einar

Former Member
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i'm experiencing similar issues as yourself, the sap tech im working with tested this on SP5 Patch 3 with improved performance.   This patch has not been installed at any of the servers here, so i cannot verify it.  He will also be testing on SP5 patch 4 to see if it was not a one off success.

Maybe try testing SP5 Patch 3 and report back?

Former Member
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Einar - Just for clarification - when using the HTML version, there is no 'Save as' to Excel.  Your only option is to 'Export as' and then can select pdf, excel, etc.

Is that what you are referring to? I wasn't sure, since I know in the applet, you actually have the option to do a "Save as" in excel format.  The Export in the HTML version does essentially the same thing (although with less notification of what is going on).

Former Member
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Hi

We are on sp5 patch3 .

I am aware of the save as ( java ) and export ( HTML )

Our users with IE11 are having some problems, but on my pc with IE8 everything is ok.

But we need to investigate more on this, if it is the size that matters or...

Keep you informed..

Regards

Einar

Former Member
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IE11 use edge mode

I'm a little confused, your original post said you were on SP5 patch 2.  You are now on SP5 patch 3?

If you are on SP5 Patch 3, has the excel performance improved?

Former Member
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Hi

When we increased the maximumUploadFileSize from 10MB to 100MB on our BusinessObjects\tomcat everything was fine regarding excel, as long as the users use "export 2007".

Have had no complains from the users since this change.

Regards Einar.

hbehrndt
Explorer
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Dear Einar, can you share where / how you have changed the setting for maximumUploadFileSize?

Greetings,

Henrik

Former Member
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This issue isn't limited to Webi, we are experiencing this issue with AOLAP.

We went from 4.1 SP1 Patch 5 to 4.1 SP4 Patch 2.

Exporting 1.3m cells went from 30-40seconds to 8 + minutes.

Have tried, xls, xlsx, csv.  Have tried exporting only 100k cells and still took 2.5minutes.  Our environment is sized quite large with a decent amount of memory, 80gb.

I will be submitting a ticket to SAP tomorrow.

Former Member
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Please keep us posted on what you hear back from your incident!

Thanks,
Missy

Former Member
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former_member213977
Participant
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Good Morning...

We too are experiencing this issue. I have users that wait over 2 minutes for a single excel file to save. Has SAP come up with any optimizations we can apply or are working on a fix for this issue yet? Our users constantly save their reports in excel so this is definitely a big issue. Were currently on the most recent patch BO 4.1 SP4 Patch 2 Update...

Mazzy thank you for mentioning the WebiAdminTool, I will be checking that out today.

Former Member
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Tiffany,

To my knowledge SAP isn't even acknowledging that there is an issue... but I could be wrong, that is just the impression I have gotten.  We have submitted several incidents in the past on this, but as of late have just been trying to find ways to workaround the performance (e.g. scheduling) issues.

We tested with Patch 2 (of 4.1 SP4), but did not see any change in our environments.  From what we have heard though, some folks did see an improvement... not sure why though.  We have compared environments, reports, etc.  Still investigating that on our end to see if we can find a difference, but nothing yet.

As an aside, if you are completely unfamiliar with the WebiAdminTool, Matthew Shaw just recently released this awesome wiki on it and I have found it very helpful: http://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/WebiAdminTool

Thanks,

Missy

former_member213977
Participant
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Missy,

I think you might find this as an interesting response from SAP Support on the saving excel issue:  " There were some issues where very complex webi reports were taking hours to save to excel; however, those have already been fixed. Where are you exporting/saving to excel?  From the Webi Rich client, the Applet in Launchpad or the default Web viewer? If you have a report that consistently takes a long time to save to Excel in BI4 but saves quickly in BOE 3.1, can you create a .biar file from your 3.1 environment in the Import Wizard?  Please ensure the webi report is saved with data (Refresh on open is unchecked). You mentioned that the 3 minute time frame was concerning.  Do your users need to do this workflow a lot?  A possible workaround would be to schedule the webi reports to excel format."

I'm replying with our setup as we do only use Applet (I have run a script applying this across the board for our users) and our reports have come from our 3.1 environment, but I believe you stated earlier you've started from the 4.0 environment. I will keep you posted though if they suggest anything as far as fixing this and not a 'work around'....

Thank you for the link on the WebiAdminTool. Thats on my bucket list for this week of things to dive into!

Thank you,

Tiff

natasa_nakic
Explorer
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I agree with everything Missy and Jack wrote so far.

I am the admin/developer of an internal SAP BOE system. We had 3.1 , 4.0.3 then 4.1 and finally 4.1. SP4. Everything is on the same server: DB (SQL Server 2010), BOE, tomcat 7. The save to excel definitely became slower and my users are also confused with no response during the first part of the export process.

short workflow: schedule webi report to save an xlsx file to a local folder on the server (same server as above)

It is a single SQL webi report, no additional formatting. Our analysts build ad-hoc webi reports from our custom unx, export the results to Excel, format the excel file further and send that to end users. Since "save as excel" started being so slow I showed them how to do scheduling to excel to offline that part at least so they can do other things in the meantime. Even the scheduling to xls can take hours.

For example, the SQL from one simple single data provider/no formatting/35k rows webi report  takes 5 seconds to refresh in MS Enterprise studio. When scheduled, it takes hours. As a workaround I end up running the SQL in MS Studio, saving as txt and importing/formatting in Excel. I do not want to teach my analysts to do this and they should not have to.

My feeling is that the process of saving to file could be optimized further as the same issue happens even if I try to save result as txt, again only on local file server, and not even copy to enterprise, just the bare minimum of work for the scheduler and it still takes very long time.

Any good ideas, please let me know, this is becoming a serious issue for us. We invested a lot of work into building a data warehouse/unx/training and now this has become a bottleneck.

Thanks,

Natasa

natasa_nakic
Explorer
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We did further testing with SP3 and the development version of SP5. This problem seems to have started in SP3 (we did not check SP2) continues in SP4 but in SP5 it looks better. No ADAPTS to link it to, it may be some other fix/regression that was causing the performance change.

We are holding off the upgrade from 4.1 to SP4 as this is a showstopper for us. As soon as SP5 is out we'll test again.

Former Member
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Boy misery loves company, but I'm glad we're not the only ones seeing performance issues with excel exports - for a while there it seemed like we might be!

I'll keep my fingers crossed that there is a performance improvement with SP5 and keep my eyes peeled for it to come out (later this month right?) so we can try it out in one of our sandbox environments too.

Keep us posted on your testing!

Thanks,

Missy

Former Member
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Natasa,

I submitted an incident to request SAP support test one of our reports with 4.1 SP5, but they had basically the same performance results we see currently on 4.1 SP4 Patch 1/Patch 2.  I will try in our environment once it is released still too, but so far it doesn't appear to be an improvement for us...

Just wanted to pass along that update...

Thanks,
Missy

natasa_nakic
Explorer
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Thanks Missy,

We tested on development version of SP5. I'll update this thread as soon as the official SP5 is available (says 15th Nov but we don't see it out yet) and we repeat the tests.

Natasa

former_member190903
Participant
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We have this issue on 4.1 SP1 Patch 8, so I think it was even earlier that you think. When we removed the 12,000 row report tab, keeping the 3,000 row tabs, it was much faster. Perhaps the APS that renders the report in Excel runs into memory issues and needs its memory bumped up to handle larger rows?

Jon

Former Member
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Jon,

I believe we have tried bumping up the memory for our APS services on our end, but possibly not since we upgraded to 4.1.  In past discussions with SAP though, I didn't believe there was any one particular service that impacted the export to excel?

Our 3 APS servers are split and memory spread across them in varying amounts based on services.  Would you mind sharing what service you are referring to on the APS and the memory setting you have for it?

Thanks,
Missy

natasa_nakic
Explorer
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Our team tested the official SP5 and found an improvement in the speed of exporting to Excel.

The same tests were run as before and the export time was finally acceptable, about 30 min for 23MB exported xlsx file instead of several hours with the previous 4.1 service packs.

Good luck to everyone!

Natasa


former_member190903
Participant
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See

for the BI 4 Process Flows. Under Web Intelligence, see Export a Document.

    In short, the Web Intelligence Processing Server is responsible for exporting to PDF or Excel. If it is scheduled, it may also use the Destination server. We use 6GB on ours and may need more.

Former Member
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Interesting... If I am reading that right, that would imply that we should be allotting more memory to the webi servers themselves and distributing less to the APS if our struggle is exports.

We have 3 webi servers - with 32GB of RAM each.  20GB on each server is split across our APSs, with a lot of that being put towards Webi Monitoring and DSL Bridge services.

What confuses me with this theory though is that I have watched the memory usage and have never seen it spike beyond 1-2GB being used by the WIReportServer.exe service (via Task Manager) even during large excel exports... but I can run a few tests and see if it makes a difference.

Thanks,

Missy

former_member190903
Participant
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I saw another post that mentioned IE 8 vs IE11 performance differed. So, what version of IE are you using and have you tried Chrome and Firefox? We hve 128GB of memory on our Servers and I too have noticed they don't appear to use up the memory. Are you using Wily Intrascope to see what's happening?

    It may also have something to do with Cache/File storage speed, since it has to save it to Temporary Storage in transit. The drives used should be on the server and as fast as you can afford.

    It would help if SAP could draw us a clear map of everything that may affect performance for large reports and a variety of actions like exporting and scheduled actions.

denis_konovalov
Active Contributor
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Since early days of Webi, the BusinessObjects and now SAP position was always - if your webi report takes longer than couple minutes to refresh or is bigger that couple pages - you're not using the product properly.

Schedule such reports, use Data services or other ETL tools to export your huge datasets to other formats.

Just because BI4.x platform allows almost unlimited report sizes now doesn't mean that having such reports is a good thing.

former_member190903
Participant
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While I agree BO is not an ETL tool, you still dodged the question. What do you think is slowing down such large reports? The main issue is that it use to be faster. So, why is it so much slower now? There was a lot of code change in getting to BI 4.x, something changed to make this worse. It affects reports under 500,000 rows too and if SAP didn't want to support this size, then why work to enable 1 Million rows in Excel when it use to be 65K?

denis_konovalov
Active Contributor
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A lot of things has changed so its impossible to say what affected this directly. I know there was a fix in 4.1 Sp4 P7 to make export process as it was in 3.1 speed wise. I'm not aware of how effective that fix it or test/comparison results with/without it.

It might be slower because 4.1 requires 4x as much resources as 3.1 does ...
maybe its because VM infrastructure is not keeping up with your deployment demands (export process is very disk I/0 dependent and that is Achilles hill of VM's.

SAP didn't enable 1 million row support , Microsoft did. 65K was limit in Excel , not in Webi.

Besides obvious things already discussed here you're best avenue to get answers/fixes for this is to have SAP support Incident opened on it.

Former Member
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Hi Denis,

Do you happen to have the ADAPT # for that excel fix in SP4 P7?  I'd like to see what patch thats included in the SP5 PX stream.

Or do you happen to know in which patch on SP5 its forward fit to?

Thank you,

Nick

former_member190903
Participant
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True, MS did that change, but SAP worked to get the output onto one tab instead of splashed across multiple tabs.

    Clarify for us, even though we deployed real hardware, each APS is still a VM and I/O is an issue with that architecture choice. Is there anything we can do to optimize this part?

    Also, if you know, are there any IE Registry settings that may be slowing this down?

Thanks for joining the conversation Denis

Jon

denis_konovalov
Active Contributor
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If your BOE is deployed to servers on real hardware, VM's disk I/0 issues are not related to you. (I mean I/O and proper performance tuning is still needed, but not the same)
APS are java processes, not VM's and as far as I can see not part of Export workflow, only refresh in some cases.
Can't say anything on IE registry. The usual "internet speed" hacks should help here , MTU size variations etc... easily googled. Not sure how much improvement that can make.

If you see this at Bi4.1 Sp4 P7+  or Sp5 P3 + or Sp6 + -- you should raise a support ticket.
Per SAP Note 1994745 it should be fixed.

Former Member
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Hi Denis,

Thanks very much for the info.  I just asked SAP support to test one of our problematic reports in an SP4 Patch 8 environment and an SP5 Patch 4 environment and they reported the same export to excel timing as we see currently on SP4 Patch 1.

We are currently evaluating which of those 2 releases (either SP4Patch 8 or SP5 Patch 4) to go to, so I will wait until we install it in our own environment before passing judgment, but support's results do not leave me hopeful.

To your point earlier, this particular report that we test with takes <45sec to refresh in webi, but takes 6min at a minimum to export to excel.  It has approx. 145,000 rows and 23 columns.  It is just under 12MB in size.  Prior to moving to BO (i.e. using the previous tool), it took 1-2min to export to excel.

Our users do schedule reports, but prior to moving to BO, exporting to excel wasn't something they had to think twice about with these reports, so to them it is decreased functionality to have to schedule it instead.

While we are talking about SAP Notes, I did see another one of interest in the release notes, 2106759 in SP4 Patch 7 / SP 5 Patch 2, which supposedly resolves the lack of a status indicator when using the DHTML pages.

So... even if we don't have a performance improvement, at least we'll get some feedback that it is still churning....

Thanks,

Missy

Former Member
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Quick update - we downloaded and installed both Patch 8 on SP4 and SP5 Patch 4.  We had some issues with Patch 8 that were not appearing in SP5 Patch 4, so (currently) we are moving forward with SP5 Patch 4...

I have only tested a small handful of our reports so far (at least one was one I sent to SAP to test for us too), but we have seen improvement in the export to excel (at least 2min has been shaved off) !!AND there is an indicator (spinning mouse icon) to signify it is DOING something! <does happy dance>

This is just testing in our single-server Sandbox environment so far, we will be moving to Dev/Test over the next couple weeks and hopefully to production end of May... but so far things look promising! 

Thanks,

Missy

former_member191664
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Thank you for verification, Missy.

2114259 - Saving as Excel a WebIntelligence report from WebIntelligence Rich Client is slower in SAP BusinessObjects WebIntelligence 4.x than in 3.1 version from BI4.1 SP5 Patch4 fixes it. Regards, Jin-Chong

Former Member
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This is still an isssue in 4.1 sp4. In fact, it is far worse for us in 4.1 sp 4 than it was in 4.0 sp4 patch 13.  When we upgraded to 4.1 sp4 the excel export takes 4x longer and we have been trying to find a reason. These are not even huge files.  We have some that are like 30,000 records and it seems to take forever.  No pop ups, hourglass, or any indication that it is happening.  Just have to wait. And, if you think nothing is happening and select to export it again, then it takes 2x longer. If anyone finds the answer please post to everyone. 

0 Kudos

Just curious: how long does it take when exporting the data from Webi RICH Client to MS Excel?

Former Member
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Jack,

Since there is no indication to the user that the export is actually going on, I use the WebiAdminTool to monitor it in the background.  Obviously that's not something a user can do - generally they contact me (as a BO admin)  and I check in on it.  It's not the most efficient activity.


Related to that though, please vote for our idea/add comments: https://ideas.sap.com/ct/ct_a_view_idea.bix?i=388E5BA6

We were previously on 4.0 SP7 Patch 10 prior to upgrading to 4.1 SP4 Patch 1 and then, for the purposes of Excel performance testing, Patch 2.  We saw no performance improvement... at all.  As I mentioned though, others who upgraded that we have talked to have seen improvements.  This was encouraging, but then disappointing when we did not have the same results.  We are still comparing environments, settings, etc. with them to see why there is a difference... no smoking guns yet.

We have some huge files, but not all - a range of 145k rows with 11MB files to 5k rows with 4MB files - all take a very long time to export (and yes, no on-screen indicator letting you know it is exporting).

I would certainly post if I had an answer! Hopefully others would too...

Thanks,

missy

Former Member
0 Kudos

Andreas - I can't speak for Jack, but in my environment, we don't use the Rich Client - our users just use the HTML version.  However, for testing purposes it makes no difference.  For example, one report we have produces 34k rows (with 33 columns) and produces a 4.5MB file.  It takes 2min13sec to export to Excel whether I do this export using HTML or Rich Client.  We have much larger reports that take a much longer time, too, but still no difference in time between HTML and Rich Client.

I guess at least with Rich Client, it has a 'saving...' bubble on the screen until it is done saving it.  This is not the case with HTML.

Thanks,

missy

0 Kudos

Just guessing here:
Could it be that the Webi report has many local calculations (formuals and variables) or filters or merged dimensions? Just trying to pinpoint a possible scapegoat..

And yes, I do understand that it used to work faster, exporting same Webi Report to MS Excel with lower Patch/SP level.

Former Member
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I just also confirmed that Patch 2 has not fixed the issue.  I ran a report that generates 46,973 rows and it takes 2'55" to pop up the save dalog.  I did this from the dhtml viewer.  the export works completely different depending on the editor or viewer that you are using.  DHTML using export-Current Document-Excel 2007 or Excel.  Either one produces same results.  From Java Editor, choose save as, choose my desktop or my documents, save as excel and it even took a bit longer. 3;03'.

I am an administrator and put every watch on this that we have available.  the only thing we see is a cpu spike but, it gets no where near 100% so it is not a cpu or server resource issue.  This is something in the coding of 4.1 vs 4.0 or earlier versions.

Former Member
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Jack,

Via the WebiAdminTool, you can see whether the export is running or not (getPages).  Here's a screenshot:

Have you used this before? Here's two links you might find helpful:
http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-45626

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-47300

This obviously doesn't make up for the performance, but it's been helpful to me in the past when questions/frustration arise about how long an export is taking - at least I can let the users know it really is still running...

Ours doesn't appear to be a server resource or cpu issue either.  I don't have pre-4.0 to compare to - we converted from a completely different system to BO 4.0 and are in the process now of upgrading all of our environments to 4.1 - so between 4.0 and 4.1 we saw no performance improvements, just bad performance overall with exports.  I will note that some folks on my team have suggested that performance was better in 4.0 SP4 (not sure what, if any, patch level)... and that performance started to decline once we moved to 4.0 SP7 Patch 7 and hasn't improved.

-missy

Former Member
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Yes Missy, I have seen that.  I am also the trainer here so I always look at things from the perspective of the end user.  I like how the interface of the DHTML viewer looks for the end user to export.  It is much better to me than the java editor SAVE AS dialog to save to excel.  But, the one thing to note is that if you do it from the Java Interface it does show you a pop up that says "Saving" then entire time.  That is nice for the end user.  They can at least see something is happening.

Former Member
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Is anyone familiar with KBA 1994745 such that any additional insight could be shared here? It's a pretty sparse SAP note... I don't have an XI3.1 environment to compare to - we just have the 4.0 environment where the exports are slow.  However, it says that whatever the issue is, has been fixed in 4.1 SP4 Patch 2 (and SP5)... I don't see an ADAPT explicitly listed for that in the Patch 2 release notes though...

Just thought I'd ask.  We are in the process of upgrading to Patch 1 now, but may move to Patch 2 if this actually helps.

Thanks,

missy

former_member191664
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Good point; there is no ADAPT found in the KB 1994745 nor in the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Suite 4.1 Support Package 4 Patch 2 Release Note for "1994745 Exporting a Web Intelligence report to Excel format takes much longer in BI4.1 than in XI3.1"

Former Member
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Hi Missy,

The issue mentioned in KBA 1994745 is fixed in 4.1 SP4 and SP5.

What is your server OS windows or Linux.

If it is Linux then it is a known issue.

See sap note 2008223 and the ADAPT mentioned in it says that it will be fixed in SP8 Patch 10(tentatively).

Regards,

Pranay Sharma

Former Member
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Hi Pranay,

Our OS is Windows. I saw when the issue mentioned in KBA 1994745 was to be fixed, which is what sparked my interest and question, but I just didn't see a related ADAPT or any additional information on the issue.  We experience slow excel exports in 4.0 when file size is large.

Are you saying the notes 1994745 and 2008223 are for the same issue, both on Linux??  If so, I would say the problem exists on Windows too.  To date, SAP has considered it working properly... which has not been easy for our users to swallow.

Additionally, there is not even any feedback to the user here saying the export is still going... separate issue, I know, and one we have submitted an idea for at the ideas place, but still. All the more reason this one caught my eye in the release notes... so I was really hoping to get more details on it.

Thanks,

missy

Former Member
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Hi Missy,

KBA  2008223 is only for linux specifically and 1994745 for general export performance improvement.

You can create an incident with us so that your report can be quickly tested in 4.1 SP4 and SP5 and that will confirm the fix.

Hope this is helpful

Regards,

Pranay

Former Member
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Also for the ADAPT query now going forth we do not create ADAPTS for defects.

The internal process is changed hence you will not see any ADAPT in SAp notes in future.

Now we mention the fix environment directly in sap note.

Former Member
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Hi Pranay,

Fair point on the ADAPTs no longer being used - I do recall hearing that in a webinar now that you mention it.

Perhaps I will open an incident to test one of our excel reports prior to/instead of downloading and applying patch 2 in one of our sandbox environments and testing on my own... it may very well be quicker!

Thanks,

missy

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A) Depending on the granularity of your report 3 years might be just too much data volume anyway. So check how much data (rows and columns) is actually being returnd to your Webi report!

B) Are you using a hardcoded OLAP connection or SSO?

For SSO enabled OLAP connections every user might see different data according to his analysis security setting in SAP BW, you would then have to schedule the report for each user separately.

former_member191664
Active Contributor
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Hi,

If the Excel output bottleneck is found to be network bound, you may improve the large Excel file network transmission between BI4.0 and client browser by adding "compression="on" compressionLevel="1" compressionMinSize="2048" ... application/vnd.ms-excel,application/pdf" to your Tomcat7 server.xml connector to enable excel and PDF compression.

There is a catch, though, the client workstation and browser is responsible to decompress the zip file once receives it, and the decompression may add extra load to your PC if undersized.

Hope this helps,

Jin-Chong

Former Member
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Hi Jin-Chong,


Thanks for your response.  We will have an opportunity to test this suggestion out this week in our test environment, so I'll let you know if helps us.  I did verify that while compression is set to on in our server.xml files, excel is not one of the applications listed.

To clarify - we would only see a potential performance improvement when a user is exporting to excel directly; this would not impact compression/performance when they try to schedule the report as excel to email, etc., correct?

Thanks,
Missy

former_member191664
Active Contributor
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Hi,

"this would not impact compression/performance when they try to schedule the report as excel to email, etc., correct?"

That is correct.  The compression on excel is only for the HTTP/HTTPS communication, and it has no impact on the scheduled job output to email as excel.

If you click on the successful instance on a timestamp with excel output format from a report's history in InfoView/BI Launch Pad, the transmission of this excel output will be compressed in HTTP/HTTPS communication.

Hope this helps,

Jin-Chong

Former Member
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Hi again,

We applied this change and ran several tests.  I am not sure how to view the history of these tests to see whether it says HTTP/HTTPs communication though since it is not a scheduled report.  We are just running the report, selecting Export to Excel 2007.

Our results are mixed - several reports were actually larger in size (despite same row/column count) after we made the change, than they were prior to the change.  The time it took for the pop up to come up (to open or save) generally decreased though (despite the larger file size).

I am not sure that it hurt us here, but I am confused as to why the file size would be larger now.

I appreciate any additional insight you can share here...

Thanks,
Missy

former_member191664
Active Contributor
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Hi,

  1. please make sure "compression="on" ... to both HTTP and HTTPS listener in tomcat's server.xml,
  2. use HTTP watcher and Firefox + Lori to monitor the HTTP/HTTPS traffic and the page load turnaround time and amount of data before and after the change.

Hope this helps,

Jin-Chong

Former Member
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Sorry for the extended delay in replying here... but no luck either way.  I also just tried the compression changes to the server.xml file with Patch 2 (on 4.1 SP4).  Times are consistent with what they prior to the change.

Patch 2 on its own made no difference for us either, though others we have talked with have reported better performance. All very peculiar...

Thanks,
missy

former_member191664
Active Contributor
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Hope you log a SAP incident as Pranay Sharma suggests before and look forward to your resolution here when performance bottleneck is fixed.

Regards,

Jin-Chong

Former Member
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Hi Jin-Chong,

I did open an SAP incident as Pranay suggested, but the same results were see - no performance improvement on Patch 2 for us.  I even applied it in a sandbox environment myself just so we could test some additional reports as well.  No luck.  I know others who have seen performance improvements, running in a similar environment and with similar sized reports, so I am really not sure what to make of it.

Thanks,
Missy

former_member190903
Participant
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Be sure to check the box for Caching Excel when scheduling, it may help when users open it.

Jon