VQSM hangs when adding call subjects and Asset data - Dual-core / multi-processor machines

I had an issue the other week with a customer whereby some of their machines on one of their sites would hang when logging calls in VQSM and in particular when adding call subjects or selecting asset data. I had their internal support team try all the usual stuff like clearing the cache on the problem machines, checking that the settings were the same for those users as others without the problem but to no avail.

The machines that were experiencing the problem were in a team in what had up until recently been a separate company to the main VQSM deployment so I started looking for differences in the machines used on this site. One of differences to the main site was the fact that they were using of Symantec anti-virus. Initially thus did not look to be the issue as other machines on the site were using the same combination of Symantec and VQSM and did not experience the same problem. I did however do some research looking for issues related to VQSM and Symantec and this led me to a a solution that resolved the issue which it turns out is actually related to VQSM when running on Dual Core or Multi-Core systems.

The workaround for this is to set the affinity for the Portal applications on the client using the imagecfg.exe utility from Microsoft to set the CPU affinity for the QSM Portal Client and Designer applications permanently.

Steps to set up affinity

1. Make sure VQSM is not running on the machine.

2. Copy imagecfg.exe into the program directory for VQSM.

The Default is : C:\Program Files\Datawatch\VisualQSM Portal).

3. Open a cmd prompt Start -> Run cmd

4. Navigate to the VQSM directory

e.g. cd "C:\Program Files\Datawatch\VisualQSM Portal"

5. Execute the imagecfg utility using the following commands.

imagecfg.exe -u QSMPortalClient.exe
imagecfg.exe -a 0x1 QSMPortalClient.exe
imagecfg.exe -u QSMPortalDesigner.exe
imagecfg.exe -a 0x1 QSMPortalDesigner.exe

NOTE: I know it's pretty obvious but if you don't have the designer client installed on the machine just execute the first two lines.

Posted by:David Bland (Transforme Associates Limited)
Software: VQSM
Supplier: Datawatch
Version: 7.x
Database: Microsoft SQL, Oracle