Avid Interplay

Re: How fast is your Interplay?

BLKDOG — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:06:04 GMT

THis was back in November 2007 Pete. The last post was December of last year. Lots of stuff has been improved since this was posted.

Re: How fast is your Interplay?

Pete Stevens — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:03:34 GMT

We currently have 4 editors on our system (3 media composers 3.0.5 and 1 symphony 3.0.5 on Interplay 1.4.2 on a 21 TB Unity.) We consistently see a slight delay ex. calling up a seq might take 6-7 secs but nothing like you are experiencing. Are you using fiber? Could be a through put issue on your system.

Re: How fast is your Interplay?

jweis — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:27:55 GMT

Usually slowness in Newscutter in interplay is associated with specific actions including performing searches, opening bins, checking in complex sequences. This can be amplified when these specific actiions are triggered during peak hours and while other activities occur (eg large deletes). Btw, several improvements have been made and the newer Interplay releases are addressing many of the original sluggishness issues.

While memory consuption may look high on the nxnserver.exe process, this is to be expected. This process will use memory as available to cache database objects and indices to minimize swapping to disk activity. This should not cause any problems by itself.

Regards

Johannes Weis

Re: How fast is your Interplay?

Raj7 — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 01:45:41 GMT

Dear jwies

Just curious about the above listed causes of Interplay Slugisness, need more details because our interplay system especially Newcutter applications showing some laggings in it operation.

What is the maximum memory usage of NxNserver.exe can be tolerate before caused any downtime?

Regards

Rajkumar

Re: How fast is your Interplay?

lawsonr — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 07:25:35 GMT

A lot of Interplay system slowness can be attributed to improper DNS or DHCP configuration. This ties directly in to how well the Lookup Service runs; if the Interplay Lookup Service is sluggish, then you're in trouble.

Can you provide more details about your system configuration? Versions are important, too. Earlier versions of Interplay were more problematic.

Re: How fast is your Interplay?

Highnoon — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:05:18 GMT

Without knowing more about your versioning and config, here's a couple observations/suggestions:

MikeyB:

Open a Bin in a Symphony Nitris - might take 5 minutes

we've seen some slowness in opening/saving bins, but it has improved greatly since 1.1.2. do a task manager and watch the AvidMI.exe process when you try to open a bin, and see if it eats up a ton of memory.

Search for some clips in the Interplay window of a NewsCutter - might never complete at all

yep. slow. rarely does it fail for us, unless the search is overly broad.

Pull a clip from the Interplay window to a Bin - might work, might eventually display a message saying the server is taking a long time to respond, and would I like to wait or cancel.

we sometimes see a lag with this (10-15 seconds) but it seems to be the process itself, not the number or duration of clips. i get the impression that bins are being phased out, and we recommend editors edit from the interplay window (i.e. load clips into the source monitor from Interplay) rather than use bins with a ton of contents (over 100 clips, eg).

there are some appreciable performance issues with the Interplay Framework, but it's improving.

A couple quick things to keep in mind:

Newest best practice is to run the Lookup service on a general purpose server, not on a MediaIndexer or on the Interplay Engine.

Older version of the Interplay Framework have known issues with the HAG-Delegate relationship within the Indexing Service. As well, try to avoid having redundant scanning of workspaces by more than 1 indexer.

Take a look at the Interplay Health Monitor (with attention paid to the Indexing service process) and see if you have low memory errors on any of the indexers.

Re: How fast is your Interplay?

jweis — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:22:48 GMT

We have observed similar behavior in some installations. The intermittent nature of slugishness has usually been related to some specific activity in the system. Here are a few things to look at:

1) Database backups during high usage

2) Delete activity

3) Intense search activity

4) Virus scanner activity

5) Backup or Windows update

6) Network slugishness

7) Configuration related (for example, is the /3GB switch set on the Engine system)

How fast is your Interplay?

MikeyB — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:57:51 GMT

Sometimes the system I'm using works well, but sometimes it's REALLY slow. Some examples:

Open a Bin in a Symphony Nitris - might take 5 minutes

Search for some clips in the Interplay window of a NewsCutter - might never complete at all

Pull a clip from the Interplay window to a Bin - might work, might eventually display a message saying the server is taking a long time to respond, and would I like to wait or cancel.

These are problems that come and go. Yesterday, my NewsCutter was sooooo sloooow - unusable - before lunch. After lunch, without having rebooted or relaunched the s/w, it was fine.

I'm not asking for solutions to these things - God knows, we have engineers a-plenty looking for those. I'm curious to see how typical these problems are.