Microstrategy Developer too slow - development-environment

I am trying to connect to an MSTR intelligent server in Seattle from MSTR Developer running on my laptop connected in Bangalore. It takes an average of 10+ seconds for any action I do on the developer, like, login or open folders or open a report or anything. It is almost impractical to do any report development this way (not to mention the frustration).
When my colleague connects to the same instance/project from Seattle he doesn’t face any delays. So I figure that this is a network issue and doesn’t have much to do with the metadata or indexes. The network response time to the box is 30ms and 300ms average from Seattle and Bangalore respectively. I found online that 280ms is average response time from India to US. Accessing the reports and projects via the web interface is smooth though.
Have you ever experienced a situation like this before? Can the network delays cause that much trouble on MicroStrategy? Please help…
PS: This question is not quite a fit for SO. But I guess that MSTR
developers face this problem normally and may be they know a fix.
Hence posting this here rather than SU or somewhere else.

This is a pretty common problem, in my experience. I believe that MicroStrategy's network traffic is XML based, so network bandwidth as well as latency is an issue.
Usually, the web server is more responsive because:
It is performing "simpler" tasks that Developer
The network-intensive traffic is between I-Server and web server, so if they're colocated, performance will be reasonable.
I'm afraid I've never come across an effective solution to this issue. Having a "jump server" in the same data centre as the MSTR servers, with the Developer software installed, is usually the most tolerable solution (provided Remote Desktop isn't too laggy).

Same solution here : we have developpers VMs on a host in the same datacenter as the server, and we remote desktop them. From there, we use Developper/object manager, etc
You can still do 90% of the tasks in web.

Related

ColdFusion 11 to 2018 Upgrade -- Server Locking Up, How to Test Better?

We are currently testing an upgrade from CF11 to CF2018 for my company's intranet. To give you an idea how long this site has been running, our first version of CF was 3.1! It is still using application.cfm, and there is code from 1998, when I started writing this thing. Yes, 21 years -- I'm astonished, too. It is a hodgepodge of all kinds of older frameworks, too, including Fusebox.
Anyway, we're running Win 2012 VM connected to a SQL 2016 farm. Everything looked OK initially, but in the Week I've been testing, the server has come to a slowdown once (a page took more than 5 seconds to run, something that usually takes 100ms, no DB involvement), and another time, the server came to a grinding halt. The only way I could restart CF App service was by connecting to the server with another server via Services, because doing it via Remote Desktop was so slow.
Now keep in mind -- it's just me testing. This is a site that doesn't have a ton of users, but still, having 5 concurrent connections is normal and there are upwards of 200-400 users hitting this thing every day.
I have FusionReactor running on this thing now, so the next time a lockup happens, I will be able to take a closer look, but what do you think is the best way I can test this? Our site is mostly transactional, users going and filling out forms to put internal orders through. We also connect to XML web services and REST services; we also provide REST services, too. Obviously there's no way to completely replicate a production server's requests onto a test server, but I need to do more thorough testing. Any advice would be hugely appreciated.
I realize your focus for now is trying to recreate the problem on test. That may not be as easy as hoped. Instead, you should be able to understand and resolve it in production. FusionReactor can help, but the answer may well be in the cf logs.
You don't mention assessing the logs at the time of the hangup. See especially the coldfusion-error log, for outofmemory conditions.
You mention raising the heap, but the problem may be with the metaspace instead. If so, consider simply removing the maxmetaspace setting in the jvm args. That may be the sole and likely cause of such new and unexpected outages.
Or if it's not, and there's nothing in the logs at the time, THEN do consider FR. Does IT show anything happening at the time?
If not then consider a need to tune the cf/web server connector. I assume you're using iis. How many sites do you have? And how many connectors (folders in the cf config/wsconfig folder)? What are the settings in their workers.properties file? Are they optimized for the number of sites using that connector?
Also, have you updated cf2018? Are there any errors in the update error log? Did you update the web server connector also?
Are you running the cf2018 pmt (performance monitoring tool set)? Have you updated it?
There could be still more to consider, but let's see how it goes with those. I have blog posts on these and many more topics that would elaborate on things, both at my site (carehart.org) and the Adobe cf portal (coldfusion.adobe.com).
But let's hear if any of this gets you going.

Stress testing a desktop app system

If I want to stress test a 'classic' client-server (desktop app <-> LAN <-> database server) Windows Forms desktop application to see how it performs when many concurrent PC users are using it, how should I go about it? I want to simulate many PC users concurrently going through a work flow, to see if it all stands up and at what point the system degrades unacceptably. I've looked at many test tools but they all seems to be skewed toward testing functionality or web app performance, which is quite different.
Clearly having many actual people on actual PCs is not practical, and lots of virtual machines on a few PCs is not representative either. 'Cloud' computing (EC2, Azure etc) looks promising but the documentation and pricing information all seems to be skewed towards mobile apps or web servers, again not the same (but that could just be presentation so I remain open to the idea). I need to be able to virtualise a small LAN of many client machines running the application and a database server.
Can anyone suggest how to do this, or recommend something?
TIA
IMHO the real question is - do you really need to do performance testing in your case? Consider this - where is your business and functional logic?
Performance testing of Desktop applications is oxymoron by itself. Desktop application is made to be used by one person at a time. So if getting a response takes 5 seconds, it will take (pretty much) 5 seconds no matter how many users are clicking the button. The only real thing close to your backend is the DB and they by design support serious asynchronous load. In case this is not enough - just make a cluster.

Optimizing long polling on dedicated server

Right now, I am hosting a site on a dedicated server, 8 GB ram, Intel Xeon E3 1230 V3. I am using long polling techniques in order to display information which gets added into a database consistently.
The problem is: so far, after around let's say 20 users come onto the site, it starts lagging and slowing down dramatically. I'm pretty sure the server is strong enough to handle way more people than that. Thus, I am not sure what exactly is the problem. Can long polling using Apache handle that many users? If not, how should I implement real-time information being displayed. And if it can, how should I configure Apache or anything in order to handle around 500-1000 concurrent users.
Any help is appreciated.

Working with patient/customer data outside of the office

Background
I am a developer that works for a health care organization. We build a variety of business apps that a majority of them contain PHI (Patient Health Information). We work on laptops in-house and occasionally have the option to work from home. Something we are discussing though is how do we handle the data stored on our laptops when we are working out of the office.
Although we have passwords and our laptops are encrypted that still doesn't seem like enough to us to protect data. What I mean by that is this. We are a small five person team. When we are working on a task we all work locally on our own databases, on our laptops. When the change is done we commit to svn and publish to a test server. Our concern is my local database is a copy of production sometimes so I can test against real data. That local database could contain thousands of records of PHI. This is obviously a major concern to us when we takes our laptops out of our building because if I have my laptop stolen, I would be putting thousands of patients health information at risk. Not something we want to do.
My Question
How do developers work as a best practice in regards to patient data safety. Or even if it was financial? Either way, how do people work with patient/customer data locally?
Is it fair to say that sometimes you just don't have the ability to connect in to a database behind a firewall or is that just negligence? Even if I keep the database internal I still have project code on my laptop. Is that bad too?
• Should I have fake data?
• Should all data be on an internal machine that you connect to?
• Should I only connect in to a machine that is internal?
I can’t imagine that is what people do all the time.
We are discussing this as a team and would love to hear your feedback in regards to "how do you or anyone work as a remote developer".
Thanks

Developing over VPN connection on a virtual desktop

Other than the possible lag issues, has anyone tried this? What are the pros or cons associated with this?
A lot of times for me it's the limitations of the remote desktop connection, be it VNC or RDP or whatever. For examples:
My workstation has two monitors. Remotely viewing my workstation reduces it to one.
Lag is tolerable in the IDE, but not with anything image-heavy. Everything from photoshopping to web browsing is done locally, not on the remote machine.
Adding to #2, when splitting up tasks between the local and remote machine, there's that extra layer of getting the two to play nice together that adds just a little bit of overhead per task, which adds up to a lot overall. Something as simple as saving a file from the web browser and opening it in the IDE takes more steps.
(I may think of more and add them later.)
All in all, it's fine if the setup can be adjusted properly. In my experience, the companies I've worked for have defined their remote connection capabilities by the needs of someone other than the software developers, and thus leave us with little pet peeves that make the process just slightly more difficult than it needs to be.
Here is my take on it from my experiences
PROS: Single dev environment, only need to license one set of tools (if applicable)
CONS: The lag got the best of me. Typing to only have it show up 1 - 3 seconds later...sometimes, other times works great. In VS, the popup notifications sometimes take forever to display as well. Other cons would include if you have to share your desktop with another employee and possible moving files to/from the dev machine as RDP does not natively allow you to drag/drop files.
same as other posters - lag when using tools that affect screen painting for vstudio (resharper,coderush) is a real problem - some stuff involving the mouse (dragging grid columns) is very difficult to use
I'd add that about every 10-15 times when I go to log back in on the physical workstation at work, it takes the stupid thing about 2 minutes to finally succeed in refreshing the displays