1. Queue management techniques
Ken Hicks – Lockheed Martin
Matt McGuire - Raytheon
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2. Agenda Know your queues Predict or identify problematic queues
How to distribute queues
Can I make a custom queue?
Helpful links
6/11/2016

3. Know your queues Queues run background processes
Windchill has many that perform background, not immediate to the user operations
A few common system impactful ones:
PublisherQueue – used to manage jobs to visualize data
WfPropagationQueue – used to run workflow/process expressions/robots
WfUserWorkQueue – used to run workflow/process for direct user actions
WfScheduleQueue – used to run workflow/process time/date based actions
Many configure ‘background’ nodes or method servers to dedicate to this
Done via configuration settings
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4. Know your queues (cont)
Cluster diagram
6/11/2016

5. Know your queues Queues run background processes
Windchill has many that perform background, not immediate to the user operations
A few common system impactful ones:
PublisherQueue – used to manage jobs to visualize data
WfPropagationQueue – used to run workflow/process expressions/robots
WfUserWorkQueue – used to run workflow/process for direct user actions
WfScheduleQueue – used to run workflow/process time/date based actions
Many configure ‘background’ nodes or method servers to dedicate to this
Done via configuration settings
6/11/2016

6. Predict or identify problematic queues
Understand your deployment/design
Datasets cause drastic differences
Propagating effectivity recursively on a 5 or 5000 part structure?
Have 1000s of users processing many workflow tasks at once?
Queues are specific to features
Workflows, CAD Publishing, Work Package exporting, etc
Monitoring the system
Queue Management
Watch for Severe entries or long running entries
PSM/JConsole
MS logs
6/11/2016

7. How to distribute queues (in a cluster)
Understand which MSs will be running queues
Each MS should have its own ‘queue group’
Name them similar to how MSs are identified
Group1 = BGMS1, etc
Associate each queue to a group
Attempt to balance based on expected workloads
Having multiple ‘heavy’ queues on one MS can lead to memory or CPU issues
Add xconf entry for each queue associating to the group
<Property name="wt.queue.WfUserWorkQueue" overridable="true" targetFile="codebase/wt.properties" value="group1"/>
Associate each MS to each queue group
Add xconf entries to disable queues across all nodes as default
<Property name="wt.queue.executeQueues" overridable="true“ targetFile="codebase/wt.properties“ value="false"/>
Add option to BGMS startup property for each intending to run queues
“wt.queue.executeQueues=true wt.queue.queueGroup=group1”
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8. Can I make a custom queue?
Yes!
But need code to add entries, and know what code to execute
Some Raytheon examples of why use custom queues
Long running custom reports
CAD relatability custom validations
Queues are just another type, so you can query for them, view entries, add entries, etc
Queue entries just say to call a static method with X parameters
Can have Process, Pool, or Schedule
Process – runs each queue entry as it comes in serially
Pool – like Process, except uses configurable # of threads (new in 10.1?)
Schedule – runs queue entries at given times
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9. Can I make a custom queue? (cont)
Example code
Note ACLs can apply to queues, so may need to be running as Site Admin user
wt.queue.ProcessingQueue queue = wt.queue.QueueHelper.manager.getQueue(“QueueName”);
If (queue == null) {
queue = wt.queue.QueueHelper.manager.create(“QueueName”);
QueueHelper.manager.startQueue(queue); }
queue.addEntry(user, // user to run entry as
“methodName”, // name of static method to run
“ext.test.TestClass”, // name of class with named method to run
argTypes, // Class[] parallel to args saying what types they are
args); // Object[] parallel to argTypes of parameters to named method
Enumeration<wt.queue.WtQueueEntry> entries = QueueHelper.manager.queueEntries(queue);
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10. PTC Support site is your friend
Helpful links
PTC Documentation
Windchill Specialized Admin Guide
Best Practices Activities for Monitoring/Maintainence
- Windchill Help
TS Documents
List of Queues with explanations - CS158339
Managing Visualization queues – CS37569
PTC Support site is your friend
6/11/2016