I find that hard to believe as well. You might have a memory leak. Make sure you don't have a lot of applications running and disable software you don't use often during startup. Once all that is done, try opening Cognos before anything else and see if there are any changes. Chances are, it could be your machine (try running it on another workstation) just my $0.02
This is definetely not normal behavior. Cognos support is excellent and should be able to diagnose your problem quickly. Give them a call or log a support call on the web at
Believe it or not, make sure you have a printer correctly setup. I can't find the exact details at the moment, but I had a workstation behaving VERY strangely and it turned out that the printer definition was referencing an invalid printer.
I would disagree with one of the previous comments saying that "Cognos support is excellent". Simply not true. I don't think they have been able to answer one of our questions yet.
Anyway ... They do say that the bigger and badder the PC, then the better. 128 MB of RAM sounds very low. We are running 512 MB on P3 900 MHZ machines.
Also, get rid of the Transformer splash screen. I'm assuming it is Transformer you are running. That slows the application load. The -nologo swith will do the trick:
Not to get into a flame war with anyone, but based on five years of my personal experience, Cognos support is very responsive. It's true they do not always have an immediate answer to your problems, especially if the issue is very technical in nature. I was just comparing their responsiveness and web support to other software vendors in general.
By the way, the printer tip by Harpsw is excellent. Impromptu always uses screen fonts based on the default printer. If the printer is invalid it can have profound effects on how Impromptu runs.
Sorry, griffindm, please don't take it personally... I was just releasing some of the frustration both myself and another colleague are having here in regards to Cognos Support.
I know it is very frustrating to have a technical issue with any software, and be routed to first line support people that seem to have a difficult time just grasping the issue, let alone reproducing it and determining whether there is a current fix or work-around.
After a while you realize that on complex issues you are really just doing bug-reporting, and that the vendor probably won't have an answer until two releases later.
The great thing about a forum such as this, is that you can tap into many good users that have found the 'warts' in the software, and in many cases have developed effective solutions or 'kludges' that at least diminish the impact of the problems.
Good luck, and keep using the forum to air your issues and to help others.
Did BiffBuff get his machines to open up fast yet? Wonder if he tried a Cognos Support Call. The Cognos Support team has been a tremendous help to me. They are competent and quick to resolve or get back and let you know they are at least working on the problem. It is better support than Microsoft!
If anyone else if having this problem (i.e. slow load of Impromptu BEFORE opening a report), here is a possible solution from Cognos is you are using Access Manager:
Description:
After a power outage during which a pc was shut down abnormally, Impromptu takes several minutes to launch. Once a catalog and report are open the program runs at a normal pace.
Solution:
In this instance, the Access Manager Runtime configuration was pointing to a directory server that wasn't currently running.
By rerunning the runtime configuration in Access manager and pointing it to a directory server that was running, Impromptu's performance was improved.
Runtime configuration can be found by selecting Tools->Runtime Configuration in Access Manager - Administration.
Cognos Support might have trouble with this one, unless you can give them some more specific details ...It's a bit of a frustratingly vague problem. I know - not a lot you can do about that.
Transformer takes 2-5 seconds to open on my PC, which is a Pentium II 350! Yes, RAM helps, but 128mb should be plenty.
Also, do you have access to the supported customers 'Knowledge Base' web site? It's definitely worth a look - iif someone's had it before it's likely up there.
Also I had a similar problem with Cognos opening excruciatingly slow. The problem turned out to be a network interface card was set to 10mbps versus 100mbps. Once this was corrected, Cognos opened up MUCH faster (uh 10 times maybe?) So the lesson is, check your network hardware configuration.
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