Why does Analysis for Office take maximum time to initialize a session?

[Former Member]

We found from statistics recorded in the system that Analysis for Office takes maximum time to just initialize a session.

For HANDLTP 'DFLT' with EVENTID ' ' time is maximum.

What does analysis office do during this time?

What is the difference between RFC and BICS connection?

Does geographic location affect performance?

Why can we notice a difference in performance when RFC Bundling is enabled?   

[Karol-K]

Hello Vivek,

I can give you answers on some questions.

What is the difference between RFC and BICS connection?

-> BICS is the data access layer. BICS is connecting to the source systems in Analysis Office via

• to BW system: RFC (SAP NCO - equivalent to JCO). NCO stays to dotNetConnector
• to HANA system: ODBC connection

So, RFC is a protocol used by BICS as data access layer.

Does geographic location affect performance?

-> it does, this is the biggest difference you see between BEx Analyzer (which was from the infrastructure a mainly backend driven tool) and Analysis Office (which has more functionality which is implemented in the frontend).

Once some functionality in the frontend requires information from backend, an RFC (remote function call) needs to be started to get the information. As BICS is using many times such calls, this is leading to worse performance in comparison to BEx Analyzer. The performance is dependent on your distance between client and the underlying backend system (WAN issues can occur).

Why can we notice a difference in performance when RFC Bundling is enabled?  

-> here comes the RFC bundling - some RFCs are put together and executed at once, this means that we save a network delay time, but not much on the execution time. At the end RFC bundling can help on slow networks (WAN scenarios) and is not much visible in "normal cases" where you have one location involved.

I hope this answers some of your questions.

Regards, Karol

[Former Member]

How significant impact can geographical location of servers cause to the performance?

[TammyPowlas]

Hi Vivek,

Which version and patch of Analysis Office are you using?

I am not a performance expert - but what are you connecting to?  Are you connecting directly to BW, BI Platform, or HANA?  Are you connecting to the BEx query?

Have you analyzed the query using RSRT?  What were the results?

Please provide more details so others can understand and possibly assist.

[Former Member]

Analysis for Office Version: 1.4.7.

We are running BEx queries in AFO. It connects to BW directly.

With BEx Analyzer 7.0 we are not facing any performance issues as such. But with Analysis for Office we are facing a huge lag almost by 200%. Most of the time before loading result tool shows 'not responding' message.

[TammyPowlas]

Vivek - would you please take a look at this SAP note http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/2037828

See if that helps

[Former Member]

Hi Vivek,

Have you applied all the BW notes for your system

[Former Member]

Ok..this was helpful. We will try to apply this note also.

But I have a small doubt, what steps does Analysis for Office tool exactly perform during EVENTID='' and HANDLTP='DFLT'. Basically during this time user sees tool as not responding.

How does RFC Bundling help in improving performance when AFO uses BICS for connection?

[Former Member]

Thanks Micheal,

But we have already applied these notes. We are using version 1.4.7

[TammyPowlas]

Hi Vivek - I don't know the RFC/BICS details myself; hopefully someone else does