Setting the Timeout Values for CA Web Viewer and DRAS

Products

• Output Management Web Viewer

Issue/Introduction

There are 3 timeout considerations in Web Viewer/DRAS processing, including the DRAS Longwait timeout. Most clients run with 15 or 20 minutes for Web Viewer and the default 60 minutes or more for DRAS.

Environment

Release: Web Viewer
Component:

Resolution

Two of these Timeouts are set in the Web Viewer Administration side. The Web Viewer Admin should go to “Preferences->General Preferences” from the Administration tab to set: 

‘Logoff user after <nnn> minutes of inactivity’ 

-This is for the amount of time that there are no actions on a User’s Web Viewer session. The user will be automatically logged out the View Repository, DRAS, and the Web Viewer application when this timeout value is hit. It is normally set for 15 or 20 minutes, but can be whatever business requirements dictate. It is NOT recommended that this value be set to the same value or higher than the DRAS Longwait Timeout value. 

‘Remote connection timeout <nnn> seconds’ 

-This is the maximum Remote Connection timeout time that it takes any part of a data request to the Repository through the CCI TCP/IP interface, before it is timed out. This only comes into play if you have archived reports in View and are using SAREAS for actual Tape recalls, or, if you have very large AFP reports being transformed to PDF. The recommended setting for this is 600 seconds. 

‘DRAS Longwait timeout’

-The DRAS Longwait Timeout is tracking logged in user activity for each user and after there has been no new activity from a user session, (no new requests to DRAS), the user will be timed out of DRAS which initiates a Repository disconnect (log out of the repository), and a DRAS Disconnect. The user will get the DRAS timeout Error message if they try to resume their session. 

Set your DRAS Longwait timeout to 60 or at least 5 minutes longer than the Web Viewer inactivity setting. Set the LONGWAIT TIMEOUT in DRAS startup JCL in the CAIOPTN file, member name CAHFDCFG.

SET LONGWAIT(60)

Additional Information

The DRAS timeout is meant to clean up any orphaned connections that could occur when the connection is lost for an abnormal disconnect somewhere in the process. 

One thing that can happen is that if a user kills their browser during a very large download (GBs of data), DRAS will keep working to get the rest of the data for their request until a timeout situation hits and in the meantime, once the user can log back in, they make the same request. That can lead to the errors in the DRASLOGs where the connection is cancelled because when DRAS gets the data to send back to the client, the user is gone.

Also please see  How to Increase idle timeout value with CA CCISSL and CCITCP