Give it more work, it will time-out, give it more time, it will work out!

As you know, I sometimes try to start my blogs with a funny title. This one I wanted to call “Give IP more time”, where IP stands for Interplot, the program that creates PDF’s for you if you use it in combination with ProjectWise Distribution Server.

The reason for it is that you might have some very large file sets, with managed workspaces and so on, and before the drawing is processed by the Interplot engine (usually Microstation) too much time has passed, and distribution server moves on to the next drawing.

For good reasons, the Distribution Server has some time-out settings, to make sure it doesn’t process for ever. This time-out is set for 30 minutes, which is more than enough for 99% of your drawings.

But, if this one drawing does not finish, it will be processed again and again, and always block your queue for 30 minutes, preventing other plots to be processed quickly.

So, give it more time, so that this drawing gets processed, and won’t be up for rendition anymore, at least not until it gets updated again.

You need to change your time-out setting in 2 locations:

1: In the Distribution services Administrator

- In Processors, you will find a “Distribution Service V8i (SELECTseries 1) InterPlot Processor”

Right-click on it to display the Properties and go to the second tab “Process Management”

The second value is “Maximum Single Message Processing Time” and set to 30 (minutes). Increase this value to 60 minutes.

2: In the Interplot Organizer configuration

- From the Start Menu, open ProjectWise InterPlot Organizer Configure from the ProjectWise InterPlot Utilities

- Click on Microstation and click Edit.

- Scroll down to the variable IPLOT_MSTN_TIMEOUT = 1800

- (Tip: Use Text Editor)

- This time it is in seconds, but still half an hour, change it to 3600 to match the Distribution Server Processor Time.