1. David Peace (Powersoft)
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. Friday, 10 November 2023 14:33 PM UTC

Hi Guys

W have a client that has made a major upgrade to the UI including adding Themes. They deploy their application in a terminal services environment. Apparently the application is using twice the amount of ram per user than it did before and unformuately brought down their production servers when it went live. They have added extra ram to the servers but obviously they want to be sure that there is not an underlying problem.

We are going to carry out some tests in our office to analyse the memory usage of the two versions of the software but in the meantime I thought I would ask on here for everyones thoughts.

When we have used PB in terminal servics before it has behaved very well on memory usage. The shared memory between each user has been quite significant and the footprint of unshared memory per users has been quite small. I expect that Themes are going to add an overhead to the unshared memory for each user which is probably why they saw such a spike in production. But it would be good to have everyones perspective on this.

Many thanks in advance

David

 

*Edited*

Our analysis shows that the Themed version is using 10% more memory that the non themed version. My guess is that the extra themed memory is non shared memeory so adds to each instance of the application. If say at least 60% of the memory is shared then in reality th eincrease will be nearer 25% per instance of the appication. The client is quite upset by this & the performance issues that they are experincing since adding themes.

Any thoughts or contributions to either of my Theme related queries woudl be greately recieved. Thisis the first phas eof a large PowerServer project and these issues are stoping the project moving forward. Although the client does understand that memory usage and performance isses will be less material when the PowerServer App is deployed to the client's own PC rather than running on thei servers.

Armeen Mazda @Appeon Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Friday, 24 November 2023 02:33 AM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # 1

Terminal services doesn't scale.  Really should deploy with PowerServer.

Comment
  1. Armeen Mazda @Appeon
  2. Monday, 27 November 2023 14:35 PM UTC
Hi David, If there is significant degradation running the app in non-virtualized environment, please try to provide test case and open support ticket so our engineers an analyze. This is not common occurrence.

As far as PowerServer, if you use the PowerServerLabel feature, most apps I have seen achieve good performance over Internet without major rewrite/redesign of the code. PowerServer will be fraction of the cost and almost zero risk compared to huge rewrite project. https://docs.appeon.com/ps2022r2/Grouping_server_calls.html
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  1. Miguel Leeuwe
  2. Monday, 27 November 2023 19:38 PM UTC
Hi Armeen,

For us developers, we might be able to speak of "a fraction of the cost", but for our customers, depending on how many licenses they'd need, it will make the product we sell them more expensive. Not all customers are huge companies, so pricing is important for us to keep them as customers.

regards
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  1. Armeen Mazda @Appeon
  2. Tuesday, 28 November 2023 03:56 AM UTC
Hi Miguel, Sounds like you are taking about OEM situation rather than internal business app. We do have OEM partnership programing with flexible pricing and licensing models.
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John Fauss Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Thursday, 23 November 2023 20:01 PM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # 2

Hi, David - 

So your customer is complaining and rejecting an upgrade because a complex window takes roughly (only) one second to open? If the slowness is due to the use of themes, I suggest they turn themes off. Problem solved.

The more complex the visual presentation, the more work themes has to do to "skin" the interface. This is one of many issues I have with themes and another reason why I do not like PB's themes feature.

I very much doubt you will find a "solution" of any kind to this issue, but I wish you well and hope you find an answer.

Best regards, John

Comment
  1. Chris Pollach @Appeon
  2. Friday, 24 November 2023 18:40 PM UTC
Hi David;

For the Tab Control(s) is your PB App using the "CreateOnDemand" property set to ON?

If not, this would be a big overhead at Window Open time. ;-)

Regards ... Chris
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  1. mike S
  2. Saturday, 25 November 2023 18:17 PM UTC
have you looked at the antivirus running on the terminal server? is the exe signed? did you exclude the application and theme directories from runtime scanning?



If it were me, i would set up a POC with PS (their full application) to see how it runs with and without themes. No sense putting in a lot of effort to get TS to run fast if the goal is to move to PS - especially if the PS version doesn't have these problems.
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  1. David Peace (Powersoft)
  2. Friday, 8 December 2023 12:36 PM UTC
The next phase of the project is a POC with PS on two parts of the system. Sadly this has been diverted by production issues, hopefully we will get back on track soon.
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David Peace (Powersoft) Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Thursday, 23 November 2023 17:32 PM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # 3

Bump to try and get a response

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Armeen Mazda @Appeon Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Monday, 13 November 2023 19:36 PM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # 4

What version of PB?

Have you disabled accessibility?

It is possible UI Themes uses more memory because it is reskinning the native controls, and terminal services is horrible scalability memory hog.  

Comment
  1. David Peace (Powersoft)
  2. Monday, 13 November 2023 23:11 PM UTC
My appologies, i should have said.... it's PB2022.

I have run some analysis today and yes themeing is using more memory, but it's not significant... about 6-10% more.



The application has a small amount of memory creep, but again not sigificant given it's complexity.



I've asked for specific memory details from their production servers. My guess is that there are/were other mitigating curcumstances that affected the memory.

  1. Helpful
  1. David Peace (Powersoft)
  2. Monday, 13 November 2023 23:12 PM UTC
With regards to accesability, they are using this feature. So we cannot disable it.
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