PowerPlay Web is out of Memory

[scost]

I am getting this error message when navigating in a cube: The request failed because it is too complex. Cognos PowerPlay Web is out of memory. Try to simplify your request. Please try again or contact your administrator.

The Cognos Knowledge Base solution for this is:
This error means exactly as it states - PowerPlay has run out of memory.
This can happen if you are suppressing zeros, and nesting at multiple levels. Because of the complex algorithms used to suppress zeros and for nesting, they often cannot be used together. Try removing the suppress zeros function, or remove the nesting and try your query again.

If I do what they suggest (Remove nesting, Remove Suppress zeros, etc) the results will be something other than what I need.

Has anyone worked with Large multi gig (3 gig) cubs in a web environment and have been able to get around this PPES limitation. The server is running 2.4 gig duel processors with 4 gigs of RAM. Cuurently all of the services are running under "local machine" and we were thinking changing them to run under a specific account name in order to take advantage of non interactive desktop heap.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

 

[scost]

I have received an answer to my previous post and here it is in case anyone runs into the same problem.

When we were performing nesting and zero suppression on these large cubes, we could watch the server process climb to 2 gig of memory usage. Once the process hit 2 gig it would fail and return the error from PPES.

Explanation: In a 32 bit environment (Win 2000 Server) and software compiled for a 32 bit environment (PowerPlay Enterprise Server), there is a 2 gig limit on memory allocated for a process. I have been told that once technology moves to a 64 bit environment (Win 2003 Server - near future?) and the software is compiled for the 64 bit environment (Cognos did not know when this would happen), then there will no longer be a 2 gig memory allocation limit per process.

 

[techsoft]

which version ppes has wilthis limitation? will it apply for ppes 7.0/7.1?

 

[scost]

Ran into this issue with 7.0 and 7.1

 

[BruceReed]

I would suggest that you suppress the "zeros" at the source (Impromptu?), that way the cube will be smaller, and the build time will be quicker.

I feel that even when Cognos goes to 64 bit, suppressing many zeros from a cube will take a lot of CPU time & memory.

I ran into this problem with all versions (4 to 7), and the only way around was to change the source data, so I did not pad the cube with null entries, and then waste time in PPES trying to filter them back out.

Good luck
Bruce