Rendition service question

Question

Hi All 
 We send documents to be render on the ICS server. 
 For some reason we have files that took like an hour to be render instead of the 30 sec average time. This seems to happen randomly. 
 
 Anyone have saw this and were able to find a root cause why out of no where one file will take more time to be render. 
 OR 
 It is normal to have random file taking longer than usual to be render?

Andrew Edge · Answer

This was answered in the other forum, but I'll echo it here. When installing iCS for PDF V8i, a choice is given between a standard orchestration or a custom orchestration. A standard orchestration configures one of each of the three primary iCS for PDF processes: one extractor (responsible for copying out documents from ProjectWise), one InterPlot processor (responsible for launching MicroStation and creating PDF(s)), and one ProjectWise processor (responsible for uploading to the destination datasource). That's in addition to the various dispatcher processes that tie everything together. iCS for PDF can definitely benefit from more RAM and additional CPUs on the server. A custom installation allows you to define additional extractors, InterPlot processors, and/or ProjectWise processors depending on your needs and the server capabilities. Optimizing the processor counts is both art and science. On a quad-core server, I would start with a 2/3/1 setup. The three ProjectWise processors mentioned in the other forum is unncessary, I think, unless source files are being distributed. It's unlikely that three InterPlot processors could generate PDFs fast enough to keep three ProjectWise processor queues full. Adding additional servers to the orchestration may also be used to increase throughput, but adds to license usage. After installing, the processor counts on the server may be changed by running RendsvcConfig in the product directory. But best practice is do so during product installation. Be aware that jobs submitted from ProjectWise Explorer are given higher priority than jobs submitted from iCS for PDF Administrator or Windows Task Scheduler. That is, when each processor/dispatcher looks at its queue, it will pull a message associated with a PWE-submitted job (if any are present in the queue) before pulling a message associated with a stored job. Thus, if you have large jobs you submit from PWE (for convenience) on a regular basis, and they are blocking small jobs submitted from other PWE users, then you could consider defining that large job in iCS for PDF Admin and scheduling it. If it and a job from PWE are submitted at the same time, both will progress through the system simultaneously, but the PWE-submitted job will generally finish first.