Scheduled jobs - Seeking advice on how the next job to be processed is decided

[Paul_Holden]

Hi,

I am seeking to better understand the scheduler / queue management process on our Alteryx server.

Currently we are running 4 simultaneous workflows on an 8 core (total 8 vCPU) VM server with 32GB RAM

We have a significant spread in job execution times from a few seconds up to 6 hours (some workflows are hitting our specified execution time limit).

The specific behaviour that I do not understand is as follows:

We have a number of jobs scheduled to run every 10 minutes. These look for files in specific folders, process them if they are present or just end if there is nothing to do. Previously I'm seeing one of these schedules triggering in the early morning when several of our larger jobs are already queued or running. The new job is queued as I would expect.

What then happens is that the job continues to sit at Queued status for several hours whilst other jobs complete. As an example earlier this week I noted that a total or 133 different jobs were submitted by schedules (not just started executing but were actually created) and then completed before the "stuck" job was finally executed. At this point it has spent over 6 hours in the queue and took less than 2 seconds to execute as there was nothing to process.

We do not use schedule priority, all schedules are set with the default (?) low priority.

I do not understand why certain jobs are getting held up in this way.

The above describes the general picture I have seen since I began to look at the queue in detail a week or so ago but this morning I have checked the queue at about 9am and there are two pages of queued jobs with scheduled start times between 2am and and 9am but a job scheduled to run at 7:30am is currently running. So all of the other queued jobs have been skipped? Obviously I'm probably seeing more of this because I am now looking but I still need to understand WHY some jobs are being prioritised by the engine in this way as it is completely ruining the entire purpose of the regularly running schedules.

Versions
Client: 2018.3.51585
Server: 2018.3.4.51585
Server Binaries: 2018.3.4.51585
Service Layer
Master: 2018.3.4.51585

[Loic]

@Paul_Holden  on the server can you make sure that you installed this:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13255

[Paul_Holden]

Hi Loic,

Does it specifically need to be the 2010 version?

If so do I need the 64 bit or 32 bit version?

I'm running Alteryx designer 64 bit but Office 365 32 bit.

I'm running the report from my desktop which has 2016 installed...

I lose track as to which of these MS packages are backwards compatible!

Note that our server does have the 2010 version installed (although I can't tell how many bits!!!):

[Paul_Holden]

 Hi Loic,

Sorry realised that this was a dumb question: "If so do I need the 64 bit or 32 bit version?", since with 32 bit Office installed I can only install the 32 bit version.

So I've done a side by side install of the 2010 engine. I still get the same error messages when I try to open the Excel file and the formatting is still no better.

I'm happy to park this one until we have performed an upgrade to our Alteryx server. I'll continue to use the data I am extracting directly to SQL from the Tableau option in the report. Also that will let us have a separate thread discussing the Excel output.

Thank you for all or your assistance to this point.

[Loic]

Alteryx Designer and Server being 64bits applications only you will need the 64 bits version of the Microsoft drivers installed. If that still happens after your various upgrade maybe support can tell you exactly why it is happening. It could be a bug. That has happened to me once and not anymore but I upgrade very often.

[Paul_Holden]

"Alteryx Designer and Server being 64bits applications only you will need the 64 bits version of the Microsoft drivers installed"

I did wonder about that.

Our Office installation is 32 bit - which I believe is fairly standard practice because of issues with availability of add-on's and third party software for 64 bit Office. So that is going to cause us some issues in the short to medium term since as far as I am aware you cannot install the 64 bit drivers if you have 32 bit Office components installed.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/-office-64-bit-or-32-bit-couldn-t-be-installed-error-when...

I'm slightly surprised that this hasn't come up more frequently. I'll have to go back to our Office team to see where we are with the feasibility of installing 64 bit office for our BI teams. In the meantime if we need to support Excel and Access it looks like we are limited to machines which do not have Office installed?

[Loic]

Possible that the 64 bits drivers are backward compatible with the 32 bits drivers. The contrary is usually not true.

Also these Microsoft drivers are not for your current office suite to use - it is for external applications (like Tableau Desktop, Alteryx Designer etc) to be able to connect to office suite types of files.

[Paul_Holden]

Hi Loic,

"these Microsoft drivers are not for your current office suite to use -"

Thanks, I fully understand that. The issue is that Microsoft consider these drivers to be an Office component and, as a result, their installer does not allow you to even INSTALL the drivers if you have one or more 32 bit Office applications already installed on the desktop [1]. You will get an error box indicating the components of <the other bit level> already exist on the machine.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/office-suite-issues/cannot-install-64-bit-offic...

"you cannot install 64-bit versions of Office 2010 products and 32-bit versions of Office 2010 products on the same computer."

"To install the 64-bit version of Office 2010, you must uninstall the products that are listed in the error message. "

This is a well documented issue that affects many third party applications e.g. SAP's (rather unhelpful) response is here...

https://help.sap.com/viewer/aad3428705d9497daed23eca43e0dab9/4.2.9/en-US/29ca7433bd0f40b7936fe567b98...

There are also a few workarounds that I have found. The issues with those are that they a) are not supported by Microsoft, b) require editing the registry which our users are not able to do and are not amenable to automation and  c) I'm not clear that they are not potentially broken if updates are applied to the existing Office installation meaning that the registry hack is not a one-time change that we could potentially apply to any automated install process. I've posted a link below [2] for anyone else who sees this thread and is not under the same restrictions on attempting the work-around.

Hence at this point I'm in discussion with out desktop support team about the possibilities of rolling out 64bit Office to at least some of our users and whether we may need to provide separate desktop images with Alteryx designer and 64 bit drivers.

I'm also going to put my modified version of the Server Usage Report onto the Gallery so that I can run that from the server which should not suffer from the same issue.

I have no idea why MS imposed this restriction on side by side installation of 32 and 64 bit Office components. As far as I can tell they have never made a statement on the technical reasons behind the decision. My suspicion is that it just was not considered and hence the 64 bit versions do not properly identify themselves as different components (see my comments about shared registry keys). Only when they rolled out 64bit Office and realised that people could not just migrate wholesale because of third party software integrations did the issue fully expose itself?😞

[1] There do seem to be one or two exceptions to this, presumably where the installer for the individual component does not make the check (correctly?). Unfortunately the 32 and 64 bit drivers share the same registry key which means that even if you are successful in installation any future install or upgrade of an Office component can break the installation. In addition if you do manage to install a 64 bit component it will quite often prevent you from then installing any further 32 bit components.

[2] Example of suggested work-around by Auto-desk, additional investigation suggest that this may not be a complete fix, is only really suitable to users who are admins on their own desktops with full permissions, and is, of course, not supported by MS:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/learn-explore/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/How-to-i...